GNU Guix launches

The Vesta configuration management tool accomplishes some of what you want by requiring all of your build tools and, in general, everything that could affect the build output, to be served by an NFS local mount, so that Vesta can keep track of all the files that the build process looked at while building. Vesta then makes a copy of the current version of each of those files in its revision control history so that you can rebuild the exact same build output in future years. :-)

(Caveat: obviously there are always more ways that this can go wrong, like your new kernel has a different set of bugs than your old kernel, that affect your compiler's behavior. But still, Vesta's approach sounded good to me.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_%28Software_configura...

Back to the direct topic: I'm excited about Guix! Because I love the ideas of determinism, transactional upgrade and rollback, and the other related features. Nix is also associated with another Very Good Idea — your autobuild system should also run the unit tests automatically, unifying "Continuous Integration" (like Buildbot, Jenkins, etc.) with autobuilder.