Hi,
Arun Isaac <[email protected]> skribis:
> The original Nix publication was helpful. On page 22 of the full thesis,
> it says:
>
> Derivation is Nix-speak for a component build action, which derives
> the component from its inputs.
Not sure if it helps, but I struggled a bit with the etymology of the
word as well and wrote this in the manual (info "(guix) Programming
Interface"):
Lower-level APIs are available to interact with the daemon and the
store. To instruct the daemon to perform a build action, users actually
provide it with a “derivation”. A derivation is a low-level
representation of the build actions to be taken, and the environment in
which they should occur—derivations are to package definitions what
assembly is to C programs. The term “derivation” comes from the fact
that build results _derive_ from them.
Ludo’.
