Comment by clhodapp
2 years ago
That is not true at all, with respect to the aims or the reality of nixpkgs. The original post here is talking about reproducing the (binary) minimal iso, which contains a bunch of binary packages.
2 years ago
That is not true at all, with respect to the aims or the reality of nixpkgs. The original post here is talking about reproducing the (binary) minimal iso, which contains a bunch of binary packages.
It is true. The original post writes about reproducing the minimal iso, which contains probably around 1% of the packages in nixpkgs. The remaining packages are not tested regarding binary reproducibility, or, at least, not in a systematic manner, which means regressions may happen regularly (which is exactly what happened with the .iso, see the previous announcement from 2021: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-unstable-s-iso-minimal-x... .)
While I would love testing reproducibility more systematically, it would not really have helped for the Python 3.10 regression: in this case we knew full well that it would break reproducibility even before we merged the change, but the performance advantage it unlocked seemed too big to ignore. Such trade-offs are luckily rare - I'm happy that with Python 3.11 we can now have both :)