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by jrockway 407 days ago
Yeah, the more I read through actual package definitions in nixpkgs, the more questions I have about selling this as some security thing. nixpkgs is very convenient, I'll give it that. But a lot of packages have A LOT of unreviewed (by upstream) patches applied to them at nix build time. This burned Debian once, so I expect it to burn nixpkgs someday too. It's inevitable.

I do think reproducible builds is important. It lets people that DO review the source code trust upstream binaries, which is often convenient. I made this work at my last job... if you "bazel build //oci/whatever-image" you end up with a docker manifest that has the same sha256 as what we pushed to Docker Hub. You can then read all the code and know that at least that's the code you're running in production. It's neat, but it's only one piece of the security puzzle.