[Nix-dev] reproducable systems at a (much) later point / archive.org

[Bjørn Forsman]

On 9 January 2013 07:38, Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net> wrote:
[...]
> Thoughts?

I really like it. I think supporting additional source mirrors is a
must-have feature :-)

I have a long term plan to use NixOS for all my systems: desktop,
server and embedded. For embedded it is especially important to be
able to rebuild the exact same system, maybe years later. This
requires a local copy of all sources and a completely offline build.

Here is my idea for nix[1]:

* have a mirror on nixos.org where all sources hydra downloads are
put. (Whether this mirror is checked before or after the upstream URL
is irrelevant to me.)
* add a config option for users to provide an URL for their own
private mirror. If emtpy, nothing happens. If non-empty, nix tries
this mirror first (to speed up build). The mirror option should handle
file:// URLs as well as ftp://, http:// etc.
* a config option to make nix error out if the private mirror doesn't
contain all sources needed for a build. Or, by any means, check that
you have a mirror of all sources needed for a build.
* a config option that, if non-empty, is an URL for nix to store all
sources it downloads. This could be set to the private mirror URL so
that the mirror builds itself.

Thoughts?

[1]: Please note that I'm a NixOS newbie at this point.

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman