Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time

Julien Malka (1, 2) , Stefano Zacchiroli (1, 2) , Théo Zimmermann (1, 2)

1 ACES - Autonomic and Critical Embedded Systems
2 INFRES - Département Informatique et Réseaux

Modern software engineering builds up on the composability of software components, that rely on more and more direct and transitive dependencies to build their functionalities. This principle of reusability however makes it harder to reproduce projects' build environments, even though reproducibility of build environments is essential for collaboration, maintenance and component lifetime. In this work, we argue that functional package managers provide the tooling to make build environments reproducible in space and time, and we produce a preliminary evaluation to justify this claim. Using historical data, we show that we are able to reproduce build environments of about 7 million Nix packages, and to rebuild 99.94% of the 14 thousand packages from a 6-year-old Nixpkgs revision.

Mots clés: reproducibility; development environment; functional package management; nix

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Julien Malka, Stefano Zacchiroli, Théo Zimmermann. Reproducibility of Build Environments through Space and Time. 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024) - New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Track, Apr 2024, Lisbonne, Portugal. ⟨hal-04430009⟩