[Nix-dev] hermetically sealed nixpkgs

[Chris Forno]

How would you go about (pre)fetching every source in the nixpkgs tree? How
large would you estimate the result to be (number of archives/space on
disk)?

In the last couple days:

* GNU bash silently updated patch 42 (
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/11475)
* OpenSSL moved the 1.0.2d release to the "old" directory (breaking the
URL) (
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/51a5f49d700890a93c36dd50e5eca4bf6ee6966b
)

These kind of breakages introduced by the external world erode the promise
of Nix that attracted me as a developer: reproducible builds into the
future. In this respect alone, Nix + a fixed nixpkgs checkout provides
little/no advantage over building in a VM: both work indefinitely as long
as you don't introduce new dependencies.

I intend to build/test a sort of hermetically sealed Nix where all
dependencies are frozen in time (saved somewhere). I suspect I'm not alone
in wanting this (
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/18611). I'd
appreciate any tips/guidance/references to related work before I begin.
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