Re: A real-life test of long-term reproducibility

[Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>]

Hi Simon,

> However, many things can be out of rail.  This claim about
> reproducibility over the time assumes:
>
>  1. compatibility of the Linux kernel
>  2. availability of all the source code
>  3. compatibility of the hardware
>
> Well, until now, nothing had been reported about #1.  But, we have
> examples of issues about #2 and #3.

Thanks for pointing this out. I have had #3 issues myself, with a
package (OpenBLAS or something related) failing to build on processors
later than the software release date. But I guess #2 is the main issue
for reviving old code. Software Heritage should settle that for the
future.

> All that said, Guix is the best and most advanced solution on the market
> for reproducible time-traveling. :-)  For most of the cases, it is
> awesome to just type “guix time-machine” and rebuild a complete
> computational environment exactly as it was 2 or 3 years ago.

Indeed!

> That’s because version-1.0.0 (48aa30ce73) is a branch and indeed not a
> descendant.
...
> What you want is tag v1.0.0 (6298c3ffd9).  Otherwise, you need the
> option ’--disable-authentication’. 

OK, thanks, I will try with that!

Cheers,
  Konrad.