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 Is Nix?
201–210 of 344 posts
Re: What Is Nix?
#202This 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…
Re: What Is Nix?
#203We're doing a project right now to try to migrate to using nix for our python code that runs on a raspberry pi. It's been great in many areas, but pretty annoying when something doesn't work. You have to dig deep to fix errors. Of course we're trying to get numpy to cross compile from x86 to armv7 which involves cross compiling gfortran to get blas... so I guess a few bugs [1] are expected. Otherwise I've been really…
Re: What Is Nix?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that someone being the auditors who are suspicious of opaque binary caches and insist on building everything from scratch.
I don't know. If that were the case, I'd imagine they would know why their build was taking hours and that it wasn't a Nix problem.
Re: What Is Nix?
#205Re: What Is Nix?
#206We're using Nix where I work as well, and while I can say it was not the most user-friendly to set up, once we got it in place it has reliably worked for the last two years. We used to have a long and flaky shell script which set up the development environment for new engineers and CI machines (for iOS development on macOS, specifically). Now we have a very simple script which just installs nix and runs alls builds t…
Re: What Is Nix?
#207Re: What Is Nix?
#208I feel someone should say something about guix here. I don’t have anything worth saying about either though
I've used nix and nixos on and off since the early versions, but it never really clicked with me, and every time I want to write or just read nix expressions I have to reread lots of documentation like I'm starting from scratch again, whereas I would probably still be able to write a debian package from memory alone despite many years of lack of practice. This leave me with the impression that nix has to be a full time job.
In another hand, I gave guix a try recently and was really surprised by how easily all the pieces fell together "naturally".
Also guix being a smaller community, it might counter intuitively be moving faster (due to less care for not breaking things or less bureaucracy, depending on your views). Indeed, another issue I have with nix is how jammed their input queue of PRs is.
Re: What Is Nix?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
#210YOU ... ... ... NIX!
Get it?