We have successfully created an independent, bit-by-bit-identical rebuild of the nixos-minimal ISO published by Hydra 🎉 Why is this useful? While there are a number of ‘side-benefits’, the main point of Reproducible Builds is that it gives us a reliable way to verify the binaries we ship are faithful to their sources, and have not been tampered with anywhere in the build pipeline (e.g. on Hydra). For general information on Reproducible Builds see: What exactly was reproduced? This me...

Great achievement by the NixOS Developers. Congratulations!

  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nzM
    1·
    1 year ago

    I thought NixOS was already reproducible, like, isn’t that the whole point? What’s the big deal here, and why is it a “great achievement” - does the Linux world now completely change? Does this revolutionize how Linux ISOs are built?

    • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 year ago

      From my understanding, Nix is currently reproducible in that you can easily run an install with a script that gets you set up with the packages and configuration that you want, but the announcement is that they can verify the binaries that they ship are faithful to their source, and haven’t been tampered with anywhere in the build pipeline

      That is almost word for word would the body of the post says

    • completion@lemmy.oneEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I think the ISO specifically wasn’t reproducible but now it is.

      Nix packages are probably what you’re thinking of. They are reproducible

      • Corngood@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        In general nix packages are not reproducible in the sense that the output will be bit-for-bit identical. When a package is built on two different machines, nix will run the same commands, with the same environment variables, using identical inputs (e.g. source tarballs). However there are various ways build systems, compilers etc can still be non-deterministic, and this effort is about fixing that.

  • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
    1·
    1 year ago

    If I remember correctly the F-Droid team on Android had a lot of trouble getting reproductible builds. I can’t imagine how difficult this would be for a whole system.