Just uploaded my bachelor's thesis to GitHub!
In it, I detail how I created a bootstrap chain for @nixos_org which builds the whole system from a small hand-auditable binary seed.
Read the thesis: https://nzbr.github.io/nixos-full-source-bootstrap/thesis.pdf
Check out the code: https://github.com/nzbr/nixos-full-source-bootstrap
My post on the NixOS discourse: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-full-source-bootstrap-for-nixos/74801
While we're on the topic: work on minimal-bootstrap in #nixpkgs has actually been picked up again since this thesis was written (October 2025).
Not only that but, as of a few hours ago, the PR implementing the last step of hooking it up to become the actual bootstrap stdenv in Nixpkgs has been merged!
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/479322
#fullsourcebootstrap #reproduciblebuilds #stage0 #minimalbootstrap #bootstrappablebuilds
Nice! Though it's a shame that I didn't manage to publish this earlier -- Could've maybe avoided some duplicate work
Arson Copperflame
Atemu
Janneke