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

[Roger Qiu]

Its definitely annoying.

There's discussion about it involving ipfs.

One stopgap solution is to rollback just for only that package. You can do
that with nix-env -f on a tar.gz archive of nixpkgs from a commit hash on
github.
On 08/05/2016 10:19 AM, "J. R. Haigh" <james.r.haigh at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>         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.
> --
> Sent from Claws Mail on NixOS.
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