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My Experience with Nix on OS X

mpscholten.de

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Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#3

Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive. I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

Many of the nix switches and commands are non-intuitive. I always have to check the man page, and I'm more often than not surprised by their choices!

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#4

Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive. I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

What makes Nix the future of package management? I'm not familiar with it so I don't know!

I looked at the web-site and didn't find it clear what it does that Homebrew doesn't, other than being cross-platform (although I recently started using Linuxbrew which has made Homebrew cross-platform-ish for me).

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#5
I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily.

If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#6
post #3

Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive. I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

Many of the nix switches and commands are non-intuitive. I always have to check the man page, and I'm more often than not surprised by their choices!

They're patterned after rpm generally.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#7

Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive. I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

What makes Nix the future of package management? I'm not familiar with it so I don't know! I looked at the web-site and didn't find it clear what it does that Homebrew doesn't, other than being cross-platform (although I recently started using Linuxbrew which has made Homebrew cross-platform-ish for me).

read this: https://nixos.org/nix/about.html

I don't know if it is "the future", but it has features that would be very welcome in other package managers.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#8
post #5

I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily. If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...

Good suggestion. Looks like travis already has an OS X build environment[0]. So technically it should be doable :)

[0]: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/osx-ci-environment/

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#9
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the nix switches and commands are non-intuitive. I always have to check the man page, and I'm more often than not surprised by their choices!

They're patterned after rpm generally.

Which is a poor choice! Picking yum or apt as the model would have been a saner choice! I feel the same way dealing with Arch Linux - being different (read "weird") isn't always better!

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#10

Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive. I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

I found Guix ones more understandable.

Also Guix switch challenge is incredible from a security perspective: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-...

Nix should take those things back. Overall, it's a great package manager.

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