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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but in terms of absolute number of packages that are truly reproducible, they outnumber Debian because Debian only targets reproducibility for a smaller fraction of total packages & even there they're not 100%. I haven't been able to find reliable numbers for Fedora on how many packages they have & in particular how many this 99% is targeting.

By any conceivable metric Nix really is ahead of the pack.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Nix, Fedora, Debian etc. I just recognize that Nix has done a lot of hard work in this space & Fedora + Debian jumping onto this is in no small part thanks to the path shown by Nix.

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They are not.

Arch hovers around 87%-90% depending on regressions. https://reproducible.archlinux.org/

Debian reproduces 91%-95% of their packages (architecture dependent) https://reproduce.debian.net/

> Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Nix, Fedora, Debian etc. I just recognize that Nix has done a lot of hard work in this space & Fedora + Debian jumping onto this is in no small part thanks to the path shown by Nix

This is completely the wrong way around.

Debian spearheaded the Reproducible Builds efforts in 2016 with contributions from SUSE, Fedora and Arch. NixOS got onto this as well but has seen less progress until the past 4-5 years.

The NixOS efforts owes the Debian project all their thanks.

From your own link:

> Arch Linux is 87.7% reproducible with 1794 bad 0 unknown and 12762 good packages.

That's < 15k packages. Nix by comparison has ~100k total packages they are trying to make reproducible and has about 85% of them reproducible. Same goes for Debian - ~37k packages tracked for reproducible builds. One way to lie with percentages is when the absolute numbers are so disparate.

> This is completely the wrong way around. Debian spearheaded the Reproducible Builds efforts in 2016 with contributions from SUSE, Fedora and Arch. NixOS got onto this as well but has seen less progress until the past 4-5 years. The NixOS efforts owes the Debian project all their thanks.

Debian organized the broader effort across Linux distros. However the Nix project was designed from the ground up around reproducibility. It also pioneered architectural approaches that other systems have tried to emulate since. I think you're grossly misunderstanding the role Nix played in this effort.

> That's < 15k packages. Nix by comparison has ~100k total packages they are trying to make reproducible and has about 85% of them reproducible. Same goes for Debian - ~37k packages tracked for reproducible builds. One way to lie with percentages is when the absolute numbers are so disparate.

That's not a lie. That is the package target. The `nixpkgs` repository in the same vein package a huge number of source archives and repackages entire ecosystems into their own repository. This greatly inflates the number of packages. You can't look at the flat numbers.

> However the Nix project was designed from the ground up around reproducibility.

It wasn't.

> It also pioneered architectural approaches that other systems have tried to emulate since.

This has had no bearing, and you are greatly overestimating the technical details of nix here. It's fundamentally invented in 2002, and things has progressed since then. `rpath` hacking really is not magic.

> I think you're grossly misunderstanding the role Nix played in this effort.

I've been contributing to the Reproducible Builds effort since 2018.

I think people are generally confused the different meanings of reproducibility in this case. The reproducibility that Nix initially aimed at is: multiple evaluations of the same derivations will lead to the same normalized store .drv. For a long time they were not completely reproducible, because evaluation could depend on environment variables, etc. But flakes have (completely ?) closed this hole. So, the reproducibility in Nix means that evaluating the same package set will lead to the same set of build recipes (.drvs).

However, this doesn't say much about build artifact reproducibility. A package set could always evaluate to the same drvs, but if all the source packages choose what to build based on random() > 0.5, then there is no of build artifacts at all. This type of reproducibility is spearheaded by Debian and Arch more than Nix.

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