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What Is Nix?

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Re: What Is Nix?

#81

Post by paul_milovanov »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #50
enriquto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Docker doesn't really care about this, the DockerFiles themselves can also describe a reproducible process, and they are certainly "incremental" due to caching (not sure of what you mean by "incremental"). Does nix power merit such a big compromise against simplicity and readability?

> the DockerFiles themselves can also describe a reproducible process This is true, but Docker does almost nothing to support reproducibility. As soon as you do an apt-get, reproducibility goes out the window. > they are certainly "incremental" due to caching Caching is layer-based. Docker has no awareness of whether or not a particular dependency has changed or what is necessary to rebuild it. Docker only understand…

Bazel is buggy?! Bazel is not a clone, it's the refactoring of the internal build system, basically. I am 99% certain that Blaze currently has Bazel at the core.

And it's pretty damn robust.

Re: What Is Nix?

#82

Post by woah »

illumin8 wrote: post #70
tel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a mess. Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system. Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system. Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It's a collection of many thousands of "derivations", many of…

I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with several projects that have been built by developers that have religion around Nix. These projects were contract work where the client paid a significant amount of money, and the final product was really poor quality. One of them is a financial application that has strict security requirements, so having a reproducible build system and some of the other qualities of Nix sound…

Ah yes.. cryptocurrency, where bizarre programming practices secure large sums of money

Re: What Is Nix?

#83

Post by Kinrany »

illumin8 wrote: post #70
tel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a mess. Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system. Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system. Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It's a collection of many thousands of "derivations", many of…

I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with several projects that have been built by developers that have religion around Nix. These projects were contract work where the client paid a significant amount of money, and the final product was really poor quality. One of them is a financial application that has strict security requirements, so having a reproducible build system and some of the other qualities of Nix sound…

So the auditors said that the system was hard to audit?

Re: What Is Nix?

#84

Post by nemosaltat »

brianyu8 wrote: post #79
genr8 wrote: post #69

Stumbled upon NixOS yesterday and today its frontpage, 1st link. Same thing happened with OpenBSD the day before. Whats tomorrow, Qubes? I wonder what the chances of coincidence are if I investigate one new OS per day. https://www.foxypossibilities.com/2018/02/04/running-matrix-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NixOS

Post a link about it tomorrow and maybe your prediction will come true ;)

Baader–Meinhof strikes again:

>Once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Fre...

Re: What Is Nix?

#85

Post by mehrdadn »

geofft wrote: post #73
dataflow wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just files" doesn't quite capture the complexity of the situation to me though. Say I happen to install package X via apt and Y via nix, and both of them depend on Z (in apt and nix respectively), and Z needs to bind to a port, then I imagine both will install but one of them will break, possibly including their dependents. Or if I install a package on Nix that expects a certain syscall that's not in the Ubuntu kern…

> Say I happen to install package X via apt and Y via nix, and both of them depend on Z (in apt and nix respectively), and Z needs to bind to a port, then I imagine both will install but one of them will break. When you install a package with apt, rpm, etc., it has the ability to run code at install time, create init scripts/systemd unit files, etc. When you install a package with Nix, it does not have that ability.…

Thank you! Your comments are always great. :) Especially this bit was I think the insight I was looking for:

> This does mean that the experience of using Nix is different from using a traditional package manager - you'll need to take care of starting the services you need, etc.

I was trying to figure out where exactly the trade-offs would be -- so that's one of them: it seems like (in some sense, to simplify) Nix takes responsibility for the data & programs, and leaves you with the responsibility of handling the control flow (at least externally).

If you don't mind, this leaves me with one more question. A typical headache that comes up during upgrades (on pretty much any distro) is config changes -- i.e., where the user and the package manager are both responsible for handling data. (Contrast this with the data/control-flow responsibility split we discussed above.) Like you modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config or any other one of the countless /etc config files that you can't configure with a .d folder, then the system upgrades and leaves you to handle the merge conflict. How does Nix deal with these? Presumably "never modify /nix/etc/..." is neither a realistic expectation for the user nor for the package manager, so there are bound to be merge conflicts, right? But that goes squarely against having a deterministic build configuration, so what happens?

Re: What Is Nix?

#86

Post by tomberek »

Nix is a powerful package manager. I can confidently compile and run multiple incompatible versions of software simultaneously. I can build projects from years ago. I can package large projects from different ecosystems (python 2/3, c/c++, go, javascript) and be confident they will not interfere with each other. I can try bleeding edge software with no risk to it interfering with my system. It is faster and less hassle than juggling various Docker containers and VMs. It protects me from dependency hell.

But overall: it makes me more productive. It is my secret weapon to manage the complexity of software development.

Re: What Is Nix?

#87

Post by bulldoa »

illumin8 wrote: post #70
tel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a mess. Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system. Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system. Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It's a collection of many thousands of "derivations", many of…

I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with several projects that have been built by developers that have religion around Nix. These projects were contract work where the client paid a significant amount of money, and the final product was really poor quality. One of them is a financial application that has strict security requirements, so having a reproducible build system and some of the other qualities of Nix sound…

Woah, I didn't know there is an entire ecosystem of contract job and auditors for big projects. How do companies usually hire contract jobs (outsourced HR, upwork, Accenture)? And how do they hire auditors?

Re: What Is Nix?

#89

Post by burke »

LockAndLol wrote: post #72

This article suffers from the same problem every nix article I read suffers from: it dives in too deep from the get go. When you sit somebody down in front of a computer for the first time in their life, you're not going to explain what it is composed of, what happens in when your mouse button is clicked and why Windows vs Mac vs Linux is a thing. Please, first tell me what nix is, provide me with a few commands to g…

That's kind of the approach I took in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRGI9KQ3_HP_OFRG6R-p4...

However, there is really an important and subtle set of concepts to grasp in order to actually understand Nix, and not just mess around with a package manager tool incidentally built with it. It's fine to not understand them, but they are what this article tries to explain.

Re: What Is Nix?

#90

Post by k__ »

magnusmorton wrote: post #88

I feel someone should say something about guix here. I don’t have anything worth saying about either though

Nix and Guix are the next generation of package management.

Nix is more idiosyncratic, since Guix usies S-expression syntax.

Also, Guix is free software, with everything that entails.

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