>Also, they are only available when hydra builds the package anyways, right? So if some package is not built by hydra (like how it used to be for the texlive packages), it'll still download the sources from the various places they are hosted.
Yes.
>As for the hash, it's good that the source code is hashed, but my main concern was that it was downloading from external sources in the first place. This is bad for privacy, as those hosts know I'm downloading from them, as well as for reliability, because the hosts might not have as good uptime as a debian package mirror.
That's a true and valid concern, but note that it's the same situation as with Debian: If the package is built upstream by Debian/the NixOS Hydra instance, then you have reliable, private access to its source code so you can rebuild it. If it's not built/packaged upstream, then you need to get the source from somewhere else.
The discrepancy is just that there's packages in Nixpkgs which are not built upstream, and which get built only locally on your machine or your own Hydra instance. There are not many of these, but yeah, it would be nice to fully get rid of them.
Or, an interesting option would be to build the source for more packages on Hydra, without actually building the binary for the package. That wouldn't be too hard, if someone adds an expression for doing it.
