81–90 of 143 posts
I think NixOS is the future, but there needs to be more time put into UX. Distros like Ubuntu are still much easier to get running and this scares many people away :/
My Linux experience so far has been limited to ls, cd and vi. From the outside, package management has always seemed to me like a huge mess. But, I've been starting to learn Nix recently and I really like it. I can add, remove, test, screw up, change my mind, whatever without stress.
"From the outside, package management has always seemed to me like a huge mess." Compared to what?! There's no OS that has historically had better (or even close to as good) package management as Linux, either in the form of apt-get/dpkg or yum/RPM. Nix is probably better, on a couple of dimensions, but to suggest it was a mess before...well, I just wonder what you could be comparing to that would be better?
Engineers shouldn't assume something is done well because nobody is doing any better. Some things suck and there's nothing to blame but other priorities or sheer laziness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The intent of reproducible builds, as defined by the reproducible builds project[0], is to have the entire dependency tree built from the complete, corresponding source code of the many projects in that tree, starting from a minimal set of "bootstrap binaries"[1]. Using precompiled binaries, without a doubt, invalidates that goal. Reproducible builds are an ongoing, unsolved problem. In Guix, some things are reproduc…
That's just wrong-headed. Every binary in the chain can be signed and reproducible (theoretically; we aren't quite there, realistically speaking, and the bootstrap, as you note, is tricky). Forcing every user to build everything from source every time is just a mess, and provides little benefit over signed (reproducible) binaries for the vast majority of users. It sounds like you (and the guix project) are conflating…
We don't want this either :) Let's not boil the oceans.
Nix and Guix are both a hybrid of build-from-source and binary package management systems. The package recipes and management tools describe how to build some software from source, and then transparently provide binaries for those recipes when the binary is available from a user-approved provider of the binaries.
But, by providing the full build recipes, all the way down to the bootstrap, users can easily rebuild binaries from source to check that their selected binary provider is honest, or to find reproducibility bugs.
In the case of a package recipe for some software that does not have source code available (a binary "blob"), the recipe would just download the blob from somewhere. We don't package those things in Guix, whereas Nix does. Although, it's not hard to make custom recipes that would do that, if you wanted to.
Am I the only one who thought Guix did this better? Maybe it's just my freakish and unnatural love of parenthesis. Or my hatred of learning new configuration syntaxes (I just want to install packges, dammit! Yes, I enjoy learning new languages, but I need to get this machine up and running, and I don't want to learn your new programming language to do that)
I understand that Guix is newer and has less packages so far (but number is growing). I don't know, I rather like Nix's language, maybe I am just not a Lisp person.
More practically, I can't think of anything that I wanted that Scheme offers but the nix expression language doesn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just wrong-headed. Every binary in the chain can be signed and reproducible (theoretically; we aren't quite there, realistically speaking, and the bootstrap, as you note, is tricky). Forcing every user to build everything from source every time is just a mess, and provides little benefit over signed (reproducible) binaries for the vast majority of users. It sounds like you (and the guix project) are conflating…
>Forcing every user to build everything from source every time >We don't want it so that everyone is forced to build everything from scratch every time. I believe it is you who is confused. I never suggested this is what reproducible builds are about. https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Substitut...
SwellJoe: Go back and substitute "source verifiable" every time davexunit says "reproducible" and everything he says makes sense.
davexunit: Read everyone else's comments from the POV where "reproducible" mean "reliable bitwise replication" without consideration of scientifically reproducible experiments or source verification, and everything they say makes sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just wrong-headed. Every binary in the chain can be signed and reproducible (theoretically; we aren't quite there, realistically speaking, and the bootstrap, as you note, is tricky). Forcing every user to build everything from source every time is just a mess, and provides little benefit over signed (reproducible) binaries for the vast majority of users. It sounds like you (and the guix project) are conflating…
> We don't want it so that everyone is forced to build everything from scratch every time. We don't want this either :) Let's not boil the oceans. Nix and Guix are both a hybrid of build-from-source and binary package management systems. The package recipes and management tools describe how to build some software from source, and then transparently provide binaries for those recipes when the binary is available from…
I have no problem with Guix being ideologically pure. Only with the notion that you can't have a reproducible build without forcing everyone to build it it themselves, which it seems is not the case with Guix. Cool.
In a CAD world, that would be like parametric drafting?
In a CAD world, that would be like parametric drafting?
My Linux experience so far has been limited to ls, cd and vi. From the outside, package management has always seemed to me like a huge mess. But, I've been starting to learn Nix recently and I really like it. I can add, remove, test, screw up, change my mind, whatever without stress.