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Nix Derivation Madness

(fzakaria.com)
184 points birdculture | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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edolstra ◴[] No.45773305[source]
The deriver field in Nix has always been a misfeature. It was intended to provide traceability back to the Nix expression used to create the derivation, but it doesn't actually do that (since that wasn't really possible in the pre-flakes world, without hermetic evaluation). So instead it just causes a lot of confusion when the deriver recorded in the binary cache doesn't match the local evaluation result, due to fixed-output derivations changing.

In the future, Nix will hopefully gain proper provenance tracking that will tell you exactly where a store path came from: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/11749

replies(3): >>45773387 #>>45774540 #>>45774609 #
1. tomberek ◴[] No.45774540[source]
Presumably this would support a big improvement to both SBOM generation as well as various UX features and workflow improvements.