stage0 VS nixpkgs

Somewhat tangential, but I'm curious how big the bootstrap seed for Nix is. That is, if you wanted to build the entire world, what's a minimum set of binaries you'd need?

Guix has put quite a bit of work into this, AFAIU, and it's getting close to being bootstrappable all the way from stage0 [0]. Curious if some group is also working on similar things for Nix.

[0]:https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

https://www.bootstrappable.org/ has some good info. Reading the source of https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 is also very enlightening. It's set its goal to be understandable by 70% of programmers.

Even if they aren't, people absolutely should be able to bootstrap new platforms from scratch. It's important to have confidence in our tools, in our ability to rebuild from scratch, and to be safe against the "trusting trust" attack among other things.

Lately I've been catching up on the state of the art in bootstrapping. Check out the live-bootstrap project. stage0 starts with a seed "compiler" of a couple hundred bytes that basically turns hex codes into bytes while stripping comments. A series of such text files per architecture work their way up to a full macro assembler, which is then used to write a mostly architecture-independent minimal C compiler, which then builds a larger compiler written in this subset of C. This then bootstraps a Scheme in which a full C compiler (mescc) is written, which then builds TinyCC, which then builds GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read:

https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...

Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.

One countermeasure not mentioned here is bootstrapping a compiler with a program small enough to be manually verified. The stage0 project is under 1KB (small enough that the binary can be, and has been, manually checked against the hand written assembly), and GNU Guix (a system for reproducible, isolated builds) is currently working on moving it's bootstrap speed to stage0. That means that, fairly soon, there will be a large set of software that doesn't have a connection to an original C compiler.

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...