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What about running your own caching HTTP proxy for your build's external dependencies or else pulling static copies of these dependencies into your own repo? It seems like the problem isn't building everything from source but rather that the sources of truth for the inputs are unreliable. You'd have the same problem trying to build e.g. Debian from scratch if you couldn't reliably pull down all the sources for things.

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A caching http proxy would help me build the same things reliably, but it wouldn't help anyone else who cloned my repository and attempted to do their own build unless I also gave them access to the proxy. And it hides the fact that the standard from-scratch build doesn't actually work. I think the cached nix packages is why it takes so long for some of these issues to be discovered.

The difference with Debian (and other linuxes) is that the source code for the build is also provided. The upstream source might be from random place on the net, but Debian provides a source package that you can use to rebuild the binary package. Maybe the solution is for nix/nixos to provide something similar.

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