Is Guix Long-Term reproducible? An empricial study and investigation into the reproduciblity of software packages in guix.

Reproducibility is a very important concept when it comes to both research and software. It is the cornerstone of scientific progress and the ability to rerun inspect and modify software are natural extension of the scientific method.

Reproducible builds are also important from the security perspective and serve as one of
the best known defenses for supply chain attacks in software.

In this talk we will discuss about reproducible builds in the context of guix package
manager. We will be covering the following topics:

1. What reproducible builds are and why do they matter?

2. An small overview of functional package managers and GNU Guix

3. Discussion of my research work* where we conduct a large scale emperical study on the long term reproducibility of guix packages in 4 popular ecosystems across 4 different revisions of Guix.

4. Discussion on the reasons for non reproducibility of packages and future work based on the results of this paper.
   
   * : The preprint for this paper will be shortly available on ArXiv
   
   

• Understanding Reproducibility and Reproducible Builds

• Learning about GNU Guix

• Understanding the current state of reproducibility of packages in Guix (Across 4 popular ecosystems in 4 different revisions in Guix)