Adventures on the quest for long-term reproducible deployment
Rebuilding software five years later, how hard can it be? It can’t be that hard, especially when you pride yourself on having a tool that can travel in time and that does a good job at ensuring reproducible builds, right?
In hindsight, we can tell you: it’s more challenging than it seems. Users attempting to travel 5 years back with guix time-machine
are (or were) unavoidably going to hit bumps on the road—a real problem because that’s one of the use cases Guix aims to support well, in particular in a reproducible research context.
In this post, we look at some of the challenges we face while traveling back, how we are overcoming them, and open issues.