Reproducible OS images (was: Irregular status update about reproducible Debian live ISO images)

[Richard Purdie]

On Thu, 2025-03-27 at 19:04 -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > We haven't even accomplished a basic paired binary/source
> > reproducible release yet, for any major release -- or have we?
> 
> I suspect Guix comes quite close... maybe also Nix, from which Guix
> got many ideas and has a similar model... the fundamental design is a
> lot closer to doing this sort of thing out of the box.
> 
> From that old thread, sounded like Yocto also was possibly pretty
> close.

Packages built from the core layer of the Yocto Project are 100%
reproducible out the box:

https://www.yoctoproject.org/reproducible-build-results/

That core layer contains everything you need to build a Linux system
with X11/wayland graphics or a decent set of commandline tools, glibc
or musl based.

One of the core outputs can be a buildtools image which is able to
build the project, so it can self bootstrap too.

So yes, pretty close :)

Cheers,

Richard