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

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 08/05/16 02:19, J. R. Haigh 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.

We have a content-addressed tarball mirror at http://tarballs.nixos.org for this
purpose. "fetchurl" will automatically use this mirror to obtain files by hash.
However:

* The mirroring script was not running lately. I've revived it so 16.03 tarballs
are mirrored now
(https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-org-configurations/commit/a17ccf87deae4fb86639c8d34ab5938edd68d8c4).

* The mirroring script only copies tarballs of packages in the Nixpkgs Hydra
jobset. Since moreutils is not part of the jobset, it's not mirrored. This can
be fixed by adding a meta.platforms attribute to moreutils.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/