Just a heads up to the author that the link to Nixpkgs is not working, shows up as [Nixpkgs][nixpkgs] E: In the paragraph titled "NIX TODAY".
Thanks, it should be fixed now
Typing Nix
111–120 of 128 posts
Re: Typing Nix
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very strongly agreed. Syntactically significant whitespace is the source of so many preventable errors that I believe it's simply not worth the aesthetic improvements.
There is no significant whitespace in what I am offering; just semicolon inference at newlines (like in modern Javascript).
Well... This is a sort of whitespace sensitivity, and I don't really like it, because that means that some tokens may or may not be meaningful depending on the context, which increases the complexity of the syntax -- and syntax is probably the first thing that I think should be dumb simple and predictable.
Re: Typing Nix
#113I'd like to bring up another sort-of alternative: http://habitat.sh It's not exactly in the same space as Nix, but not very far from it, either. In Habitat, you use a language that felt to me quite similar to Arch Linux's PKGBUILDs, but extended with container-specific things like service ports etc. Habitat outputs containers that can be started in various orchestration technologies, like Kubernetes or Mesos/Marathon…
It's interesting and very similar to Nix, but I still didn't figure out purpose of it, especially why it heavily uses Docker. Many people use Docker for the same functionality that Nix provides: bundling application with its dependencies, not for isolating groups of processes from each other.
Docker images is one of the supported formats when exporting packages. Others at the moment are aci, mesos and tarball.
Re: Typing Nix
#114How does Nix compare with conda[0] ? I could not find any useful resource, in my team we were hesitating between the two, for packages management ; finally we went for conda because it (seems)is better documented and package description is easier to write for newbies. And also we are a Python shop, so other devs felt more comfortable with conda. Personally I prefer Nix, though, and I wanted to advocate for it but the…
I wrote this document: http://catern.com/posts/deps.html which briefly compares both Conda and Nix among other things. (warning: it's very pro-Nix :) )
Not to put down Nix, but some of the arguments about other systems have counterexamples. For instance, it's common in rpm or dpkg distributions to have multiple versions and implementations of things, and richer dependencies than simply on packages. You can also do unprivileged installation into a separate root with, say, fakechroot or PRoot, and you need something like that to install and run Nix unprivileged, don't you?
There are comparisons with alternatives in at least the propaganda for Spack and 0install, though the same criticism might apply to those -- I don't remember.
Re: Typing Nix
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
You tried guix ? I still have a fondness for sexps, but ML would be nice too.
I need CUDA drivers for what I am working with, and I have found no way to install it in Guix. Otherwise, it looks interesting enough. (Sexps are usually not my first choice, I think it is a "lazy option" for people who do not want to write parsers / design their own syntax. Even then, they are better than current Nix expressions).
Does something actually stop you packaging proprietary binaries, perhaps privately, for Guix? It's clearly better to say No, but CUDA is a case where that's difficult.
(I don't see what's wrong with adopting sexps to avoid dealing with custom syntax -- quite the opposite,)
Re: Typing Nix
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote this document: http://catern.com/posts/deps.html which briefly compares both Conda and Nix among other things. (warning: it's very pro-Nix :) )
Not to put down Nix, but some of the arguments about other systems have counterexamples. For instance, it's common in rpm or dpkg distributions to have multiple versions and implementations of things, and richer dependencies than simply on packages. You can also do unprivileged installation into a separate root with, say, fakechroot or PRoot, and you need something like that to install and run Nix unprivileged, don't…
rpm and dpkg don't support having multiple versions and implementations of things simultaneously installed. Not sure what you mean by richer dependencies.
>You can also do unprivileged installation into a separate root with, say, fakechroot or PRoot
Yes, but that's the only way to (safely) use such package managers without privileges; so that's not viable to do for production.
>and you need something like that to install and run Nix unprivileged, don't you?
Install, yes. Run, no. Setting up Nix does require root, but once it's installed on a system it can be safely used without privileges by all the users on the system. That's very valuable in itself, but it's especially interesting when you consider providing access to a single Nix store over a network filesystem, or providing it to multiple different virtual machines or containers.
Re: Typing Nix
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that I am being simultaneously irreverent while also expressing how I feel about these two debates (semicolons and significant whitespace). I'm someone who has worked in a large variety of languages, including Python (significant whitespace) and Javascript (no significant whitespace). First: semicolon inference in Javascript is an abomination :). If the language says that whitespace is not significant, t…
I come from Scala, and there semicolon inference works flawlessly. Why do you consider it to be an abomination in Javascript? (Except this famous corner case with continued line, almost never encountered in practice).
Things like this[1] are why I dislike semicolon inference. I very much think in language grammars, and languages that do clever things on top of that tend to annoy me. And, yes, I realize significant whitespace is likely implemented as a an edge case outside of the grammar, but it's at least simple.
An interesting thing with Scala is that in the BNF, "semi" is defined as ';' or nl.[2] After doing some initial reading about Scala, I was pretty much wondering why Scala needed semicolons at all. What you call "semicolon inference" seems like it's more like "optional semicolons", in that the language doesn't really need them.
[1]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29743009/in-scala-are-se... [2]https://github.com/jystic/language-scala/blob/master/doc/syn...
Re: Typing Nix
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to put down Nix, but some of the arguments about other systems have counterexamples. For instance, it's common in rpm or dpkg distributions to have multiple versions and implementations of things, and richer dependencies than simply on packages. You can also do unprivileged installation into a separate root with, say, fakechroot or PRoot, and you need something like that to install and run Nix unprivileged, don't…
rpm and dpkg don't support having multiple versions and implementations of things simultaneously installed. Not sure what you mean by richer dependencies. >You can also do unprivileged installation into a separate root with, say, fakechroot or PRoot Yes, but that's the only way to (safely) use such package managers without privileges; so that's not viable to do for production. >and you need something like that to ins…
On RHEL 6 I count eight different packages implementing the MPI standard -- multiple versions of three implementations of essentially the same API -- which can be installed together. The richness is that dependencies are not generally simply on packages; MPI packages provide things like "mpi", "openmpi(x86-64) = 1.10.3-3.el7", "libmpi.so.12", and config(openmpi) = 1.10.3-3.el7".
My Guix installation runs using a with privileged access to the store, and Nix is the same as far as I know. I don't know why Nix would be a particular advantage on our HPC networked filesystems, and it's not clear it's tenable for users to be able to DoS the store by installing an arbitrary amount of software in limited shared space.
It may well be that Nix makes the right set of trades-off against other possibilities for a given situation, but thta seems at least not completely clear cut.
Re: Typing Nix
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you can make a better surface syntax ... http://gnu.org/s/guix Lisp is pretty good at lists. The only important language is the derivation language sent to the daemon. Nix spends so much time building up inputs... for shell scripts. I always felt like they would have been so much more successful if they chose some other, more popular language to generate derivation.
I dig Guix, but Lisp is also one of the most commonly reviled syntaxes, so it's hard to say it's clearly better, or that Nix would enjoy more adoption with S-expressions.
Reviled by people who have never used it.
Re: Typing Nix
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need CUDA drivers for what I am working with, and I have found no way to install it in Guix. Otherwise, it looks interesting enough. (Sexps are usually not my first choice, I think it is a "lazy option" for people who do not want to write parsers / design their own syntax. Even then, they are better than current Nix expressions).
Does something actually stop you packaging proprietary binaries, perhaps privately, for Guix? It's clearly better to say No, but CUDA is a case where that's difficult. (I don't see what's wrong with adopting sexps to avoid dealing with custom syntax -- quite the opposite,)
The kernel it ships with won't load blobs.