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What is Nix and why you should try it

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Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#101

Post by lfam »

roblabla wrote: post #98
ben0x539 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't one prefer the original over some rando's weakly motivated, niche NIH rehash, unless you're already victim to lisp-induced Stockholm syndrome?

> some rando's This is a GNU-approved fork > weakly motivated Has lots of strong motivation, like a stricter stance on non-free software, the usage of a "real", more expressive language (Guile) instead of a niche, poorly undocumented DSL (Nix), use of GNU Shepherd instead of SystemD for the init system, among other > niche NIH rehash It shares most of the codebase with Nix, so to say it's NIH is missing the point. Ni…

> It shares most of the codebase with Nix, so to say it's NIH is missing the point. Nix improvements are shared with Guix, and Guix improvements are shared with Nix.

In Guix, the only code from Nix is the Nix daemon. There is not really much code going back and forth, mostly just bug fixes.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#102

Post by davexunit »

roblabla wrote: post #98
ben0x539 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't one prefer the original over some rando's weakly motivated, niche NIH rehash, unless you're already victim to lisp-induced Stockholm syndrome?

> some rando's This is a GNU-approved fork > weakly motivated Has lots of strong motivation, like a stricter stance on non-free software, the usage of a "real", more expressive language (Guile) instead of a niche, poorly undocumented DSL (Nix), use of GNU Shepherd instead of SystemD for the init system, among other > niche NIH rehash It shares most of the codebase with Nix, so to say it's NIH is missing the point. Ni…

Guix doesn't really share any of the codebase with Nix. Guix uses a modified version of the Nix daemon, but that is a tiny fraction of the total source code. Guix is an alternative implementation of the packaging model pioneered by Nix, plus additional features not found in Nix.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#103

Post by pknopf »

I have used NixOS. It's fustrations led me to develop this.

https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch

It is essentially Docker, but you can boot bare-metal with it. It even uses Docker under the hood.

Every boot is a fresh boot. You can read-write during boot, but all changes are made to ram. You mount with fstab things you want persisted, like home.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#104

Post by davexunit »

sly010 wrote: post #91
pmoriarty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the major turn-offs for me in regards to Nix was that it uses a ton of bash scripts. Guix's use of Scheme is a lot more elegant and powerful, and a lot less hacky than bash.

You could use nix the same way guix uses scheme. The lowest level operation in nix is not "run-this-bash-script" but "run- this-executable-with-these-arguments".

But even still you are mixing languages, so the problem remains. The issue is not that Nix uses Bash, but that Nix uses different languages for the host-side and build-side. AFAIK people aren't writing the build-side code in the Nix language, and I'm not sure if it even has the features necessary to do it. Guix unifies the different layers of code execution with a single language, and using a Lisp enabled that design.

For a complete explanation of this design, see the "Code Staging in GNU Guix" paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00833

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#105

Post by davexunit »

jitl wrote: post #39
gcoda wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my practical reasons I can not use pure GNU distributions, I am not aware of easy community way to re use packages for other distro or something hacky like that. Not everyone have brainpower and time to build custom packages for rare distro, it is a shame, I really like Guix. NixOS got some recepies for using not 100% libre software.

This is also what keeps me away from Guix. I get that there are third-party repos with non-free software, but using a fringe package of a fringe packager is too far for me. There’s no good choice here: Nix package definitions and tools are inscrutable and user-hostile; and the alternative Guix is burden with GNU/free software zealotry and GPL. A somewhat comparable third option is Habitat, from Chef. It also has a pu…

Including non-free software in Guix would defeat the goal of a 100% bit-for-bit reproducible distribution. Non-free software is incompatible with Guix both ethically and technically.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#106

Post by davexunit »

amelius wrote: post #18

Python solves this problem with "virtualenv", where the user creates a virtual environment and installs all programs and libraries into that environment. The user can have multiple virtual environments, and it is easy to switch between environments.

Every language has it's equivalent of virtualenv, and that's the problem: it only works for that language's tools and libraries. I don't use Nix, but I do hack on an alternative called GNU Guix sometimes, and I wrote a tool called 'guix environment' which is similar to virtualenv but applicable to any software. Having a generalized solution is much better than one virtualenv tool and package manager per programming language. In Nix the equivalent tool is called nix-shell.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#107

Post by pknopf »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #33

My experience with Nix was a real pleasure, and a complete failure. I set out with the goal of building a development environment for a software I was working on. I thought - Nix sounds like a better Docker, where it's possible to choose package versions independently of the rest of the system. It's perfect for testing! I found the package description language refreshing - it was powerful without getting too complica…

I have used NixOS. It's fustrations led me to develop this.

https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch

It is essentially Docker, but you can boot bare-metal with it. It even uses Docker under the hood.

Every boot is a fresh boot. You can read-write during boot, but all changes are made to ram. You mount with fstab things you want persisted, like home.

It uses very simply primitives, which makes it easy to use. Squashfs/grub-mkconfig/overlayfs/etc. Docker isn't exactly a "primitive", but it is easily reasoned with.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#108

Post by xfer »

taktoa wrote: post #97
xfer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, when i look at new distro, i look for how well the repo covers binary packages, i have no time/resource to build compilers/big projects. Last time i checked nix, there aren't that many packages in repo to be usable on laptop. But the package manager itself might be a good idea for dev environments, but all the languages i use provide similar facility(not counting system-library dependencies).

I'm confused by this statement. `nixpkgs` contains tens of thousands of packages, the majority of which have binary substitutions via the NixOS Hydra build farm. Usually the only time I build things from source on my NixOS laptop are when I override some package to use a patch of my own design. Hell, when I was using Arch Linux I found myself building things from source _way_ more often than after switching to NixOS.

I use void-linux and the only thing that i am building from source(aside from language specific pkgs) are emacs-git and st(terminal emulator).

At that time, most packages were old version on nixpkgs and some weren't available. I will look into it again, when i have the mood to switch distros.

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#109

Post by icebraining »

pknopf wrote: post #103

I have used NixOS. It's fustrations led me to develop this. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch It is essentially Docker, but you can boot bare-metal with it. It even uses Docker under the hood. Every boot is a fresh boot. You can read-write during boot, but all changes are made to ram. You mount with fstab things you want persisted, like home.

Interesting. Isn't that essentially a livecd? Have you considered using Archiso? If so, what do you see as the advantages of darch?

Re: What is Nix and why you should try it

#110

Post by [deleted] »

pfranz wrote: post #26
amelius wrote: post #18

Python solves this problem with "virtualenv", where the user creates a virtual environment and installs all programs and libraries into that environment. The user can have multiple virtual environments, and it is easy to switch between environments.

virtualenv solves virtual environment as much as pip solves OS package management. Not that it's not useful, but you see all over where you have little fiefdoms that work pretty well for their little ecosystem, but become a mess if you integrate stuff outside (virtualenv, rbenv or pip, npm, gem, rpm, apt or make, ant, scons, jam). A lot of these systems are just reimplementations tailored to language-X. Nix is pretty…

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