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Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

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Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#91

Post by vertex-four »

seagreen wrote: post #77
vertex-four wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haskell is honestly a larger language, and is a pain in the butt to write. If you're just writing configuration or a very simple package, Nix is basically "JSON with colons, multiline strings, and function calls". Haskell doesn't have a reasonable built-in syntax for dictionaries/maps/whatever you want to call them, which is 95% of Nix.

Well, you would use records, but records are a weak point of the Haskell language. I've discussed "why not Haskell" with some Nix people and they specifically mentioned the lack of row polymorphism.

You couldn't reasonably create a record for the NixOS configuration - the amount of options (fields) is massive. The all-packages.nix file is an untyped dictionary mapping strings to derivations as well.

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#92

Post by chriswarbo »

SwellJoe wrote: post #62
zzzcpan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's unusable on small VMs, it takes like almost a gig of ram to install something and lots of time to figure out how to edit some config if it doesn't have an option for your needs. So, yeah, if they want users - they need to work on that.

That's interesting, and not something I'd noticed (I have a 2GB NixOS VM for tinkering with it). That makes NixOS far less attractive for the things I was think it would be a natural for: containers. Because containers need to be reproducible, and because the current crop of container management and deployment tools are really messy, NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too,…

> NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too, eventually)

NixOS has support for hosting containers, which share the Nix store with the host, so they're presumably pretty lightweight.

I've tried running NixOS in VMs, using Nix on Ubuntu, orchestrating things with NixOps, etc. and found that it's much more painful than just installing NixOS on the bare metal and managing everything via /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#93

Post by SwellJoe »

davexunit wrote: post #80
SwellJoe wrote: post #78

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...

I believe several people were confused by your statement. So, at least I'm not alone.

I interpreted your statement of "Using pre-compiled binaries means that builds aren't reproducible, a goal of both Nix and Guix" to mean, "Guix does not distribute pre-compiled binaries, because they can't be reproduced". That still seems an entirely reasonable interpretation of that sentence, to me, as someone with no familiarity with Guix.

But, I now see that your intended meaning was that Guix does not distribute stuff like nvidia blobs, or Flash player, which is a perfectly reasonable choice for them, and nothing less than I would expect of a GNU project (and Fedora, my current favorite desktop distro, has the same policy, so I don't have a problem with it).

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#95

Post by SwellJoe »

SSLy wrote: post #79
SwellJoe wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Um, IPS, BSD ports and pkgsrc are a thing.

IPS and ports, really?

pkgsrc isn't bad at all, but definitely not better than yum or apt. One might prefer pkgsrc, but one couldn't reasonably say yum or apt are a "mess" compared to pkgsrc.

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#96

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

vertex-four wrote: post #67
dbcurtis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I replace my naive question above with a different naive question: "Why not just use Haskell?"

Haskell is honestly a larger language, and is a pain in the butt to write. If you're just writing configuration or a very simple package, Nix is basically "JSON with colons, multiline strings, and function calls". Haskell doesn't have a reasonable built-in syntax for dictionaries/maps/whatever you want to call them, which is 95% of Nix.

A third naïve question: why not just use a functional subset of Scheme? It's got a well-defined syntax for key/value mappings, which is fast enough, funcalls, and you can use lazy evaluation if you use a pure subset of the language.

And in any rnrs complient Scheme, it's fairly trivial to make a strict functional dialect. And in Guile or Racket, it's even easier.

Unfortunately, Guix doesn't do this. Which meant Guix can't guarantee referential transparency. Although if the packager is an ANY WAY competant, it will be maintained.

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#97

Post by Ericson2314 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #62
zzzcpan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's unusable on small VMs, it takes like almost a gig of ram to install something and lots of time to figure out how to edit some config if it doesn't have an option for your needs. So, yeah, if they want users - they need to work on that.

That's interesting, and not something I'd noticed (I have a 2GB NixOS VM for tinkering with it). That makes NixOS far less attractive for the things I was think it would be a natural for: containers. Because containers need to be reproducible, and because the current crop of container management and deployment tools are really messy, NixOS seems like a natural fit for building containers (maybe for hosting them, too,…

https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os is an experiment for a "pre-fab nixos"--i.e. a stateless images that do not themselves contain nix. I'd like to see this sort of functionality implemented in NixOS proper.

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#98

Post by joseph »

icebraining wrote: post #68
rb808 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a non-trivial shop you'll need to harden it, you're better off with CentOS/RHEL than Ubuntu.

Why?

Probably because mainstream distros like RHEL have third party tools available to verify that instances meet standards such as CIS. NixOS might be a great design, but that isn't going to matter to $InfoSecDepartment when they lack the ability to audit.

Edit: Just noticed the parent was comparing RHEL to Ubuntu, not NixOS, so now I'm not sure :).

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#99

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #85
rdtsc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I greatly respect scheme, and yet I like the nix expression language too. Scheme's claim is you shouldn't be using x more bloated language than it, but the nix expression language is smaller and simpler than Scheme; it beats it at its own game! More practically, I can't think of anything that I wanted that Scheme offers but the nix expression language doesn't.

>the nix expression language is smaller and simpler than Scheme; it beats it at its own game!

It may have a smaller stdlib than scheme (but I doubt it). But it's very hard to be simpler than scheme semantically.

As for what I want from scheme that nix doesn't provide, a simple, regular, syntax that I already know is what I want. I understand that that doesn't apply to everybody.

Re: Purely Functional Linux with NixOS [video]

#100

Post by yiyus »

Artlav wrote: post #65
johncolanduoni wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps for the newer Windows platforms (e.g. UWP) but Win32 installers have definitely been known to put things all over your system.

Yeah, that's the reason why i have a "got installer? not worth using" pre-filter for Windows software. Not sure how things are these days, but i'm talking about the Win 9x to Win 7 days.

But that is not a packaging system. You can put binaries in zip files in Linux systems too.

And I don't understand what kind of software you used with that pre-filter. You cannot even install drivers then.

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