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

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 01/09/2013 10:19 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net> skribis:
>
>> Given that nix would support a "last-resort mirror" and given we could
>> convince some instution (e.g. archive.org) to provide such a mirror, the
>> world would be always able to exactly reproduce software installations
>> and we could show our / somebody's grandchildren how we kept ourselves
>> entertained.
>
> Given a mirror of every source tarball, you’d still need a working
> bootloader and kernel (or full NixOS).  In practice you also need to
> take Nix, Nixpkgs, and NixOS of the same date, because they are largely
> interdependent.  But yes, Nix is definitely forward for software archeology.

Virtual machine image might be the best you can get AFAIK. It's also 
very possible that binaries take much less space than sources (which 
have other advantages, OTOH).

I still don't understand why nix, nixos, nixpkgs (and perhaps others) 
aren't within one repository. It was so in svn and the interdependence 
not expressed in the VCS can IMO cause problems (although one can 
synchronize by time of patch creation).

Vlada

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