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Comment by lamby | Hacker News Reader

Mmm. I inherited a rather hardcore strain of liking entirely deterministic builds from being a Debian Developer and would never give up the dependability of it now. In fact, the thought of a build process connecting to the internet to download code just seems so utterly broken in my world view I actually find it difficult to explain it properly to others.

I'd love to be able to do it without embedding code copies, or at least have a smarter system than that.

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Sounds like you might like https://github.com/heavenlyhash/mdm ... yummy hashes for determinism, good for binary blobs, embeds semantic links in git, and uses git transports so you can swap out network or local filesystem trivially.

But for the most part these build processes are for web apps... If your build can't connect to the internet, your web app isn't going to work (even if it can build).

Sure, but it's not like the entire Internet is up at once. If rubygems.org goes off-line, it shouldn't mean you can't deploy your Rails app.

Why does my personal (or intranet) webapp needs an internet connection to work?

Actually, your web server being able to make requests out on the open internet is considered a security liability.

If it lives behind a proxy, a web server being able to talk to anything but the proxy server and database is a matter of developer convenience.

> I'd love to be able to do it without embedding code copies, or at least have a smarter system than that.

Maybe a section on the Server where gems lie, and a section on the hard-drive of your dev computer where gems lie - and then in a build process, it finds the gems with a certain checksum or tag or something similar. That's an interesting idea you have.

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