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Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

Debian wasn't built with reproducibility in mind, whilst NixOS was. "Backporting" features to existing systems is monotonically harder than building a new system with that feature, since we have more constraints.

Even if, hypothetically, it were trivial for NixOS to obtain perfect reproducibility, that doesn't necessarily help with making Debian reproducible in a backwards-compatible way.

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Both kinds of work are useful, and cross pollination is likely possible - the issue list here is enlightening:

https://reproducible.debian.net/index_issues.html

Almost none of those things are debian specific - they're things like "the timestamp of when this was built is put in the documentation" or "the kernel version is put in the binary".

Issues of those types would affect any OS and build system, and are would impact any system, even one with source purity goals like NixOS and similar.

Honest question: is NixOS really doing reproducible builds, where you get byte-identical binaries when rebuilding from source?

I only found this issue on the Tor tracker, and apparently NixOS does not produce reproducible builds in the same way as intended by Debian: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12520

The aim is to have such reproducible builds, for example builds are always performed with the system clock set to 1 second after the Unix epoch. The reality varies from package to package; reproducibility problems are counted as bugs, but as always there's a cost/benefit decisions about fixing them.

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