[mikepurvis]

You still need to trust something though. It's just that instead of trusting the signing of the binaries themselves, you trust the metadata that maps input hashes (computed locally) to content hashes (unknown until a build occurs).

The real win with content addressing in Nix is being able to proactively dedupe the store and also cut off rebuild cascades, like if you have dependency chain A -> B -> C, and A changes, but you can demonstrate that the result of B is identical, then there's no longer a need to also rebuild C. With input addressing, you have to rebuild everything downtree of A when it changes, no exceptions.

[im3w1l]

Is B remaining the same something that happens often enough for it to matter?

[mikepurvis]

I haven’t studied it, but yes I would imagine so. For example if a python build macro changes but the sphinx output remains unchanged, you get out of rebuilding thousands of packages that throw off sphinx docs as part of their build.