[Foxboron]

Which package manager would be more reproducible than pacman and Arch?

We hover around 85% and 89% reproducible packages across all our packages and no distro, to my knowledge, is close to anything like this.

https://reproducible.archlinux.org/

[kaba0]

Nix?

[Foxboron]

It's not. It's marketing. The focus of Nix is reproducability in the same wain as docker: Same dependencies for the same behavior. They can't guarantee bit-for-bit reproducability any more then your average distribution.

Arch Linux has a rebuilder setup and you can safely reproduce between 85% and 89% of the repository packages.

Nix has never done such a thing, and would be far away from any comparable numbers.

[kaba0]

This is literally linked in a reply to you: https://r13y.com/

Nix is 99.77% reproducible, so come on. It’s not marketing, nix just properly solves the problem for the first time ever.

Guix is another example, it is more into “bootstrappability” though, so packages can be built from source all the way down to a few kilobyte C-subset compiler written in assembly. Very cool!

[Foxboron]

>Nix is 99.77% reproducible, so come on. It’s not marketing, nix just properly solves the problem for the first time ever.

You haven't read r13y properly.

>1733 out of 1737 (99.77%) paths in the nixos.iso_minimal.x86_64-linux installation image are reproducible!

600 packages becomes 1737 paths which are the inputs used to generate the image. Several of the compared paths are just static files which doesn't change, so the "path to package" comparison doesn't work either.

EDIT: An example set of stuff it attempts to compare can be found here:

https://paste.xinu.at/TmVM0y5FBDWX/

Taken from the build here: https://buildkite.com/grahamc/r13y-dot-com/builds/1149#01813... They have not solved the problem.

[kaba0]

It’s almost as if no matter how reproducible your dependencies are, if the given build process/tool wants to play dirty it will. I really don’t see how arch fairs any better here, care to elaborate? While it is a different problem, my litmus test for package managers is installing gnome a (the whole group) and then seeing whether I can transition to kde or vice versa without a bunch of dependencies lingering around forever. Pacman, apt, etc. all fail terribly here.

[Foxboron]

> I really don’t see how arch fairs any better here, care to elaborate?

Arch has spent a considerably amount of time getting to the figure it has and is in the same position as NixOS to maintain reproducible builds. The claim that NixOS solves this, or is uniquely dispositioned to solve this, is the false. That is what I'm effectively trying to point out here.

>While it is a different problem, my litmus test for package managers is installing gnome a (the whole group) and then seeing whether I can transition to kde or vice versa without a bunch of dependencies lingering around forever. Pacman, apt, etc. all fail terribly here.

That is not what Reproducible Builds is about.