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

[Oliver Charles]

On Sun, 8 May 2016, 1:19 a.m. 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.
>

While I agree this is a problem, this is not a problem with determinism. If
the source code can't be found as it is expected, then the build fails -
that *is* deterministic.

        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.
>

We do have the mirror:// scheme which knows to look in many locations, but
I imagine the source you're referring to is not mirrored?

Ollie
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