Along similar lines, when I was reading the article I was thinking "this just sounds like a slightly worse version of nix". Nix has the whole content addressed build DAG with caching, the intermediate language, and the ability to produce arbitrary outputs, but it is functional (100% of the inputs must be accounted for in the hashes/lockfile, as opposed to Docker where you can run commands like `apk add firefox` which is pulling data from outside sources that can change from day to day, so two docker builds can end up with the same hash but different output, making it _not_ reproducible like the article falsely claims).
Edit: The claim about the hash being the same is incorrect, but an identical Dockerfile can produce different outputs on different machines/days whereas nix will always produce the same output for a given input.
> whereas nix will always produce the same output for a given input.
If they didn't take shortcuts. I don't know if it's been fixed, but at one point Vuze in nix pulled in an arbitrary jar file from a URL. I had to dig through it because the jar had been updated at some point but not the nix config and it was failing at an odd place.
> so two docker builds can end up with the same hash but different output
The cache key includes the state of the filesystem so I don’t think that would ever be true.
Regardless, the purpose of the tool is to generate [layer] images to be reused, exactly to avoid the pitfalls of reproducible builds, isn’t it? In the context of the article, what makes builds reproducible is the shared cache.
It's not reproducible then, it's simply cached. It's a valid approach but there's tradeoffs of course.
Ah you're right, the hash wouldn't be the same but a Dockerfile could produce different outputs on different machines whereas nix will produce identical output on different machines.
You can network-jail your builds to prevent pulling from external repos and force the build environment to define/capture its inputs.