[Nix-dev] Source URL breakage – please can we improve the determinism

[J. R. Haigh]

Dear Nix project leaders,
	I don't find NixOS to be very deterministic at all, and it's nearly always for the same reason: source files on random servers scattered across the Internet going walkabouts.
	Please can we have all source files hosted by the Nix project and all source URLs in nixpkgs and nixpkgs-channels replaced or accompanied by the Nix-hosted copies. Ideally there should be a way to specify multiple URLs for each source file, so both the original and the Nix-hosted locations can be specified, as well as any other mirrors if there are any.
	As for the duration of the hosting, I think that at least every release build that goes through Hydra to build live images and such should keep hosted files (source or binary alike) indefinitely. Anything that was not one of these Hydra builds I don't mind too much if they go missing because I nearly always stick to the release builds, but it would still be appreciated if all source files could be hosted indefinitely to aid with binary searches of regressions or other changes.
	Better still, if magnet URIs could be specified and Nix would support downloading from torrents then it would be very easy to avoid breakage due to missing source files.
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	In this specific instance, please could someone with commit access resolve this breakage a.s.a.p.?: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/blob/nixos-15.09/pkgs/tools/misc/moreutils/default.nix
	Perhaps it could be done by updating it from 0.57 to 0.58 or by finding it on another mirror somewhere. The Debian source archive at http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/moreutils/ lists 0.47, 0.52, and 0.58, but not 0.57. Moreutils is depended on by Mercurial and Mercurial is a build dependency of many things, so that one source breakage has broken a lot of things from building in the head of the NixOS 15.09 release channel branch.

Best regards,
James R. Haigh.
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