Too bad that Nix don't work with fish shell
I'm using Nix and Fish and have been for a year or two now. I remember some issues initially but NixOS and home-manager have boolean options to enable Fish and it Just Works nowadays.
What Is Nix?
281–290 of 344 posts
Re: What Is Nix?
#282This 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…
Yeah I was trying to do Linux things on my Chromebook and some blog or other recommended Nix as package manager. I was like cool this is like apt-get but trendy I'll try it.
I then proceeded for like an hour to try and figure out how you say apt-get install in Nix. There was all this documentation but none of it said "here's how you install emacs and stop thinking about Nix"
Re: What Is Nix?
#283This 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…
> 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
I’m attempting to write some hands-on pragmatic no-bullshit articles tackling that.
Why? I’ve been hearing a lot about Nix over the years, how it’s an experiment yet so good it’s actually usable. But every article I found obscure the good parts, either because of too much details and theory or because they’re apt->nix-env but without the whys.
And the good parts are really good. So good that as soon as I was enlightened I simply dropped my lonesome 13 years ArchMac project on the floor.
But it needs a pragmatic approach to explaining what it is and how it can be of value to you day to day. Everything is actually in the manual, but it lacks some ties with existing knowledge for people to make the jump, unless they’re really really curious enough to piece things together.
That’s what I’m writing.
Re: What Is Nix?
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That was my reading, based on the fact that they glossed over Nix itself and attributed most of the issues to code complexity.
It explicitly says this, though:
> while much of that build time is attributable to Nix's way of building dependencies
And that part just doesn't make sense to me. I can't see any way in which specifically Nix's way of building dependencies would contribute to this. The compiling of the universe, sure, but then why mention Nix?
Re: What Is Nix?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please take your badly-informed language bashing elsewhere. I actually audit dependencies for a living, and the dependency model that JS uses is far, far preferable for auditability over the "monolithic tightly-coupled framework and a mountain of custom badly-maintained copy-pasted business logic" approach that is widely used elsewhere.
The mean, median, and modal web “application” depends on several thousand packages comprising dozens of layers of dependencies deep. The mystery code that is downloaded and executed when a developer runs `npm install` is orders of magnitude larger than functional operating systems. There is absolutely no quality assurance: these packages are published by literally-no-one-knows with no oversight whatsoever. `npm` suff…
Seriously, piss off. You clearly don't understand the tools you're loudly complaining about, and it's interfering with what was otherwise a productive discussion about Nix and build times.
Re: What Is Nix?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
“who liberally makes use of single-responsibility modules” If your aim is precision of language, you should call this “400MB of unaudited and unauditable mystery code from the [total clowns]( https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/3646 )* who run the npm ecosystem.” Imagine [this]( https://medium.com/s/silicon-satire/i-peeked-into-my-node-mo... )* but instead riddled with advertisers and intelligence agencies. Burn it d…
Part of the removed code: test("guy", function() { assert.equal(typeof babel.guy, "string"); }); Facepalming so hard right now
In case you hadn't noticed, this was a joke commit. The code in question was never actually a real part of Babel.
Re: What Is Nix?
#287I really wish nix was the solution, but I'm not sure it is. I currently don't install anything on my base system, but do it via docker. Looking through my dockerfiles, currently I have stuff installed via: * apt * apt preceded by apt-key add * wget/curl * pip & pip3 * git clone * go get * npm install * snap And that's even though I try to avoid esoteric package managers as much as possible. (For example, there was so…
nix is the solution. It's totally different from any random packager you've seen. It goes the reversed direction of abstracting dependencies away: it makes dependencies explicit (and reproducible!)
I get it, but my point is that unless it can cope with packages that aren't in the ecosystem, it will just add another variant rather than solving the problem, as per https://xkcd.com/927/
It reminds me a lot of http://www.vestasys.org/
Re: What Is Nix?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/3185 please somebody throw github.com/volth or me money to finish this
Would it be possible for you guys to team up and do an opencollective campaign for nix on windows? The static-haskell-nix[1] project was successful with this approach. Nix on Windows would be amazing! [1]: https://opencollective.com/static-haskell-nix
I cannot speak for Volth, but I am far more pressed for time than money, and largely paid to work on open source as it is, so it's not like that would be dramatically more fun than what I normally do or something.
Also I think in the short term this needs a burst of effort rather than trickle of paid maintenance costs: we're firmly in capex not opex territory.
Re: What Is Nix?
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Same execution environment everywhere" is one way which developers use Docker. Docker gets this by copying the layers of a built image. Unlike nix, the image building itself doesn't need to be reproducible. So you can have a Dockerfile which works now but will fail to build in however many months. "Reproducible builds" do get you "same execution environment everywhere". But they have the stronger guarantee that for…
I do have to commend Docker for providing and managing an agreed upon VM for non-Linux users to host all their containers. It's the "killer-feature" that has made it as successful as it is. But underneath it requires a VM (libcontainer,LXC,virtualbox,hyperkit,etc) on non-Linux machines. This helps developers work together and quickly get small projects up and running. I'd contend that after a while, a mess of contain…
Have you checked out the official container system in NixOS?
Re: What Is Nix?
#290This 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…
So... statically compiled executables? Wasn't that tried long ago and it was determined that the user should be able to choose when to upgrade dependencies, such as if a dependency needs an out-of-band update to work on the localhost OS?
Good point: statically compiled binaries are a big problem for security updates.
This applies to Linux distributions as well as large organizations that have their internal distribution (like Amazon).