live-bootstrap VS nixpkgs

Not using this, but tangentially related is (full disclosure, i am a maintainer of this project) live-bootstrap, which uses about a KB of binary to do a full "Linux from scratch" style thing - read https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... for all 143 steps you have to go through to get there.

Actually you can skip a file system entirely if you do something like stage0 or live-bootstrap https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap

See https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap, and https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst has all the steps we take.

live-bootstrap builds a variety of intermediate systems, starting from a <1KB binary seed (kernel excluded). Check parts.rst for a description, it's kinda wild just how many C and C subset compilers get compiled... but the end result is a system with musl and GCC 4.7, from which building the latest GCC is 2 steps away.

There is also live-bootstrap which uses a similar bootstrap chain to Guix (stage0 -> Mes -> tcc -> gcc), but without needing Guile/guix-daemon binaries etc. The whole thing starts with just a 357-byte binary seed (source)!

There's some cool stuff being done in this area. For example, live-bootstrap goes from a tiny, auditable binary seed to a full GNU userland using only source code (and a Linux kernel).

I don't think so. The article is probably intended for the Nix community, so the author doesn't need to convince HN that something is going on. If as an outsider you are interested then you need to look into it yourself, the community has no obligation to make their internal conflicts legible to the outside world.

As an outsider myself, it certainly looks like something is going on as more than 20 Nixpkg maintainers left in a week: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=label%3A%228.has%3...

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset

I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors

For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...

For example,

```

Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...

I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...

NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.

I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.

Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

In this specific case, nix uses fetchFromGitHub to download the source archive, which are generated by GitHub for the specified revision[1]. Arch seems to just download the tarball from the releases page[2].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3c2fdd0a4e6396fc310a6e...

[2]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ib...