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My Experience with Nix on OS X

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Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#51

Post by mitchty »

hk__2 wrote: post #13
nikolay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> being different (read "weird") isn't always better! To go further, being different is almost always a bad idea. People are used to how current stuff works; you need a really good reason not to provide the same interface.

Sure but its not different/weird. I've used rpm for a long time, using nix was more, oh ok so rpm type flags no big deal.

It is weird mostly due to exposure to other tools. IIRC nix started out over 10 years ago, well before apt or yum became very widely used.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#52

Post by icebraining »

ramblenode wrote: post #46
aeosynth wrote: post #15

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

It's hard to say what caused this without more information, but the flip side is that it demonstrates the power of Nix. Everything required to get Atom working--all the way down to something as basic as the display server--is explicitly declared in the configuration and can be downloaded and installed with one command. So although this wasn't what you intended, Nix was actually doing what it is supposed to do: acquir…

Isn't generating and installing a dependencies tree one of the most basic tasks of a package manager, at least since apt and similar came about in the late 90s?

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#53

Post by renox »

defiancedigital wrote: post #2

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 totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

Perhaps, if they clean it up significantly, I think that nix's principles are very sound, but the implementation isn't: it's fine when you are using it as a simple package manager but as soon as you want to do something a bit complex (say building gcc with a different kernel version) you're on your own:

1) half of the documentation makes reference to configuration files which aren't in my version of nix??

2) there is no real mail/news forum for support/help: no IRC isn't enough.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#54

Post by electroly »

ramblenode wrote: post #46
aeosynth wrote: post #15

Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

It's hard to say what caused this without more information, but the flip side is that it demonstrates the power of Nix. Everything required to get Atom working--all the way down to something as basic as the display server--is explicitly declared in the configuration and can be downloaded and installed with one command. So although this wasn't what you intended, Nix was actually doing what it is supposed to do: acquir…

This is true, literally, of every package manager that came before Nix and every one that will come after. It's fundamentally what a package manager is and does. This isn't the power of Nix -- it's table stakes.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#55

Post by novembermike »

iElectric2 wrote: post #47

Disclaimer: Nix(OS) developer, I am biased. It's very important for us to get such feedback. This allows us to improve and move forward. In Nix defense I think it's not worth comparing stability yet, although that is the most important aspect for users. What matters currently is how many smart people grasp the idea why we're fundamentally better by architecturing the language and packaging problem itself and any help…

I played around with it and ended up getting rid of it for basically the same reasons, but I have to say that I was impressed by how easy it was to remove. When I got rid of Homebrew I had to run a script that did a bunch of non-obvious things, when I got rid of Nix I did rm -rf /nix && rm -rf ~/nix-* and removed a line from my zshrc.

My main complaint with Nix itself was that Vim was built without python support so Youcompleteme didn't work and it wasn't obvious how to recompile it to have python support, but the experience was nice enough that I'll give it another go later on.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#56

Post by curun1r »

iElectric2 wrote: post #48
curun1r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Nix on OS X after a recent HN topic suggested it. I hate Homebrew with a passion (it's fine initially but, over time, it's always created a hard-to-clean-up mess for me), so I was looking for something that could replace it for most unixy things I need to install. I immediately ran into a showstopper bug that they've had for some time now. Apparently, they've focused on NixOS and the CA certificate configurat…

Did you report an issue? We might have bugs like that, but the promise of a better package manager still persist.

There's many variations of this issue open. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/3382 for an example. Most are still not closed and have been open for long enough that it doesn't seem hopeful that they'll be fixed soon.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#57

Post by curun1r »

DHowett wrote: post #44
curun1r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Nix on OS X after a recent HN topic suggested it. I hate Homebrew with a passion (it's fine initially but, over time, it's always created a hard-to-clean-up mess for me), so I was looking for something that could replace it for most unixy things I need to install. I immediately ran into a showstopper bug that they've had for some time now. Apparently, they've focused on NixOS and the CA certificate configurat…

> packaged as a .pkg, which makes it really easy to cleanly erase installed software. In theory, but there's no package uninstaller and OS X installer packages are neither pure nor idempotent. While you can remove the files installed by one, there's no straightforward or platform-provided way to undo the changes made by their (generally unknowable) install scripts. Incidentally, Apple shipped an Xcode uninstaller; wr…

Yes, it's not as clean as Nix when it comes to uninstall, but using piping pkgutil to rm has never gotten my machine in as borked of a state as Homebrew inevitably does. Also, many .pkg files provide an uninstall script of their own which is almost always reliable.

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#58

Post by curun1r »

jperkin wrote: post #49
curun1r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Nix on OS X after a recent HN topic suggested it. I hate Homebrew with a passion (it's fine initially but, over time, it's always created a hard-to-clean-up mess for me), so I was looking for something that could replace it for most unixy things I need to install. I immediately ran into a showstopper bug that they've had for some time now. Apparently, they've focused on NixOS and the CA certificate configurat…

> At the moment, the best I can find for OS X is Rudix. The selection of available software is pathetic compared to Homebrew and Nix, but a lot of the core stuff is there and it's all packaged as a .pkg, which makes it really easy to cleanly erase installed software. Apologies for hijacking a Nix thread, but I'd love your views on our OS X binary package sets[0]. We currently ship over 14,000 pre-built signed package…

I wasn't aware of this, but it looks really promising. Thank you for posting this!

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#59

Post by nikolay »

mitchty wrote: post #51
hk__2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being different (read "weird") isn't always better! To go further, being different is almost always a bad idea. People are used to how current stuff works; you need a really good reason not to provide the same interface.

Sure but its not different/weird. I've used rpm for a long time, using nix was more, oh ok so rpm type flags no big deal. It is weird mostly due to exposure to other tools. IIRC nix started out over 10 years ago, well before apt or yum became very widely used.

RPM-based distros are not the most popular, though [0]!

[0]: http://distrowatch.com/

Re: My Experience with Nix on OS X

#60

Post by mitchty »

nikolay wrote: post #59
mitchty wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but its not different/weird. I've used rpm for a long time, using nix was more, oh ok so rpm type flags no big deal. It is weird mostly due to exposure to other tools. IIRC nix started out over 10 years ago, well before apt or yum became very widely used.

RPM-based distros are not the most popular, though [0]! [0]: http://distrowatch.com/

Sure, now, but was that the case 10 years ago? I'm not arguing its the best choice but more that you need to take into account the age of things. Being exposed to it just now doesn't mean it was created in that situation. I'd say 10 years ago rpm based distributions were the more dominant and emulating rpm was a fine choice.
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