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Comment by RGamma | Hacker News Reader

Well as long as we can't formally enforce security and end to end verify hw+sw we'll have to live with varying amounts of trust and checks.

Wrt reproducibility: NixOS minimal ISO is now 99+%, GNOME ISO at ~95% (measured heuristically as described there): https://reproducible.nixos.org

Didn't realize they have gotten this far already!

The actual problem lies in the code that is packaged... A dev sneaking in malware in the CI/CD pipeline would paint a huge target on their back because it's easy to detect and normally few well-known members get to control this. Including malicious code in an obscure dependency however...

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I looked into nixos. First of all it has same problem as all other distros where you need to trust a signed image file.

Secondly, on the page https://nix.dev/contributing/how-to-contribute they say "Currently the focus is on funding in-person events to share knowledge and grow the community of developers proficient with Nix. With enough budget, it would be possible to pay for ongoing maintenance and development of critical infrastructure and code – demanding work that we cannot expect to be done by volunteers indefinitely." So that means they want a centralized team.

Third there's an active topic there which shows clearly that the team behind nixos is centralized and corrupt and politically driven: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from...

This whole project smells like a honey pot. Centralized = bad.

Got any ideas what you would like to see instead/how to solve these pain points?

I've looked into running my own hydra instance recently. It's possible but I don't have the machine that I could host it on for my purposes right now (I would want to mirror the fixed output derivations and be able to compile most things in ramfs).

Great question but I'm not experienced enough developer to give the best answer. I don't know if it's possible to make this happen in the near enough future but the best would be if we could build the distro ourselves "reproducible builds". Then we can know for certain there are no added malicious modules added by the person signing the image.

Otherwise I think whatever the solution is, it must be a decentralized and censorship resistant solution, which means there must also be anonymity for the devs otherwise they can be forced to do bad things or even put in prison for working on a freedom software.

I think we can probably learn a lot from Monero's developers. I think the best solution is probably a fair launch DAO where everyone can vote on who should be allowed to be a developer, who will do the signing, which features we want, etc.

I think others can give better and more detailed answers than me. I will look into what hydra is that you mentioned.

Hydra is the CI/CD platform executing jobs (the nixpkgs/NixOS job is defined in nixpkgs itself).

Having lurked for some years in the NixOS community I think it's too early to insinuate wrongdoing. It's no guarantee, but I believe all core contributors are giving their best. If malware gets distributed it's from upstream-compromised software.

The technological basis for verifiable IT is not well developed for now, but my guess would be they'd embrace it immediately (many core contributors come from the functional programming community). As things are, they are looking for resources to make core development sustainable. There's a million things to do (just look at the nixpkgs bug tracker). Cachix and hydra and the labor are expensive...

And dunno about the political angle. That sort of shit is part of life for decades in the distro space (and in most organisations of any kind) and we'll manage.

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