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A comment on Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rube Goldberg machine?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rub... by 0x0 on Monday January 30, 2023 @01:39PM (#34584378)
Well of course it snakes back, and likely beyond debian's inception, your initial c compiler has to come from somewhere.
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Re:Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rub... by anderskaseorg on Monday January 30, 2023 @01:44PM (#34584455)
Right. Nix bootstraps from a fixed collection of seed binaries, and everything in any given commit of nixpkgs is derived from the seed binaries and versions of software that exist in that commit of nixpkgs. It doesn’t solve the “trusting trust” problem with those seed binaries, but it does solve the “arbitrarily long chains” problem.

(The work at https://www.gnu.org/software/mes/ aims to minimize the needed binary seed to a human-auditable size, and should be applicable to Nix and Guix.)

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