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What Is Nix?

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Re: What Is Nix?

#191

Post by Ericson2314 »

cldellow wrote: post #141
nilkn wrote: post #129

This article is a good explanation of how nix works at a high level, and I'm excited to see nix getting some really prominent support, but for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it. In other words, I don't believe it ever compellingly answers the question that constitutes its title. The word "package" doesn't even appear until near the end o…

The PhD thesis that goes with Nix is a really great intro to it. It's very accessible and well-structured. It motivates the need for a new take on package management by analogy to memory management in programming languages. It contrasts how software deployment works today (“Fuck it, I’m sure /usr/bin/local/python is a reference to a python 2.7.12 install with PIL available”) to how we used to write software (“Fuck it…

I gotta use pointers? Ugh, sounds hard, I think I'll just stick to DOS. /s

Re: What Is Nix?

#192

Post by Ericson2314 »

nerdponx wrote: post #139
nilkn wrote: post #129

This article is a good explanation of how nix works at a high level, and I'm excited to see nix getting some really prominent support, but for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it. In other words, I don't believe it ever compellingly answers the question that constitutes its title. The word "package" doesn't even appear until near the end o…

What I'd really like to see is a realistic, end-to-end tutorial for either 1) deploying a relatively straightforward web application (like Dokuwiki or ZNC), or 2) setting up a basic desktop for day-to-day use. I feel like I've seen a lot of "snippets", I feel like I understand how Nix works and what it's supposed to be good for, but I don't have a coherent sense of the steps involved in actually using it for mundane…

Look for nix users' "this is not a dotfiles repo" repo on GitHub.

Re: What Is Nix?

#193

Post by alphachloride »

After reading the article, I am still asking the same question: What is Nix?

Edit: from their website https://nixos.org/:

> Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments.

Re: What Is Nix?

#194

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

nerdponx wrote: post #139
nilkn wrote: post #129

This article is a good explanation of how nix works at a high level, and I'm excited to see nix getting some really prominent support, but for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it. In other words, I don't believe it ever compellingly answers the question that constitutes its title. The word "package" doesn't even appear until near the end o…

What I'd really like to see is a realistic, end-to-end tutorial for either 1) deploying a relatively straightforward web application (like Dokuwiki or ZNC), or 2) setting up a basic desktop for day-to-day use. I feel like I've seen a lot of "snippets", I feel like I understand how Nix works and what it's supposed to be good for, but I don't have a coherent sense of the steps involved in actually using it for mundane…

It's a bit old now, but not that much has changed. All my commercial projects use essentially this method of deployment.

https://jezenthomas.com/deploying-a-haskell-web-service-with...

Re: What Is Nix?

#195

Post by bsima »

A lot of misunderstanding and overexplaining in these comments. The reality is that Nix is a complex system of many parts, under active development, and yet is perhaps the best infrastructure we have for creating deterministic, hermetic, reproducible builds. I've worked on one of the largest Nix systems and it saves our entire dev team hours. Everything is only built once, on a large set of specialized remote builders, then shared among all of our devs, CI, and deployment infrastructure. Perhaps this is common in FAANG, but Nix enables this even for small teams and individual developers.

If thats something you would like to learn more about but are having trouble getting started, I'm happy to help. Email is in my bio. We could setup a call or chat session or whatever.

Re: What Is Nix?

#196

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

m_mueller wrote: post #189
illumin8 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I understand correctly from this that nix has no binary packages? If so, why not? To me, compiling from source is not strictly necessary to get reproduceability guarantees. It might actually be harmful if you're not carefully checksumming the build products (e.g. cosmic rays messing with complex builds).

You do not understand correctly.

Nix users use binary caches[0] instead of building everything from source. You can use the binary cache provided by NixOS, or Cachix[1], or something you set up and host yourself, or all of the above.

[0]: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Binary_Cache

[1]: https://cachix.org/

Re: What Is Nix?

#197

Post by amelius »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #190
amelius wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that the approach works best when packages are aware of the Nix approach. But the packages have not been written with Nix in mind, and some work is needed per package to adapt to the approach.

Nixpkgs has already done much of that work for you, thankfully.

Yes that's true. But some things remain difficult, for example installing the latest version of CUDA.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/cuda-setup-on-nixos/1118/9

Re: What Is Nix?

#199

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

jariel wrote: post #120

I loathe to be so critical, but I have no idea what this is. I'm sorry to say but this is a bad article - either that - or nix itself is a mishmash of things impossible to explain. I just see red flags everywhere. If it's 'A' - then maybe take some time to do a high-level introduction and some context. - 'Everything depends on something else' - really? Most 'installed software' doesn't depend on a whole lot else. Doe…

> - 'Everything depends on something else' - really?

Yes. Really.

> Most 'installed software' doesn't depend on a whole lot else.

Yes it does. Your ignorance of this fact does not make this any less a fact.

> Does the author really mean server software? Development environment?

All of it.

Re: What Is Nix?

#200

Post by ryukafalz »

m_mueller wrote: post #189
illumin8 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I understand correctly from this that nix has no binary packages? If so, why not? To me, compiling from source is not strictly necessary to get reproduceability guarantees. It might actually be harmful if you're not carefully checksumming the build products (e.g. cosmic rays messing with complex builds).

I can't entirely speak for Nix, but I know they're fairly similar, so: Guix (and I'm pretty sure Nix) have optional binary packages. Realistically most users will use those, but the option to build from source is always there. So, while you say:

>To me, compiling from source is not strictly necessary to get reproduceability guarantees.

...I somewhat agree, but you do of course need to be able to build from source. And, in a system like Nix or Guix, you have an easy way to verify that a build and all its transitive dependencies are reproducible, if you have someone else's build to compare it against. See `guix challenge` for example: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-chall...

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