A look at Nix and Guix

Posted Feb 29, 2024 14:21 UTC (Thu) by zimbatm (guest, #100783)
In reply to: A look at Nix and Guix by Foxboron
Parent article: A look at Nix and Guix

A better comparison is the Gnome ISO, including the build dependencies: https://reproducible.nixos.org/nixos-iso-gnome-r13y/, but that also includes all the fetch URLs, as far as I know.

There is some truth in the sense that some variance in reproducibility is removed when using Guix/Nix because of the build sandbox. It removes some classes of reproducibility.

But without all the effort that Debian, Arch and other distros have put into reproducibility, the above graph wouldn't be at ~95%. The real hero is the https://reproducible-builds.org/ project.

A look at Nix and Guix

Posted Feb 29, 2024 19:43 UTC (Thu) by Foxboron (subscriber, #108330) [Link]

All distros build in a sandbox, there is not *really* a lot of magic to it and the benefits are shared.

The fact that NixOS does other things, like setting timestamps to 0 and the like, is not a property of the sandbox itself.