Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit • Hacker News Board

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#241

Post by lfam » Wed, Apr 14, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #220

lfam wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, we're glad to hear you're interested in Guix :) I just wanted to say that Guix doesn't hate systemd, or think of itself as an anti-systemd project or anything like that. Systemd was not chosen because GNU already had a (quite simplistic) init system written in Guile Scheme, and we want to use Guile for the entire system. Eventually, our goal is to offer a fully integrated interface for managing the system, just…

Is it really wise to go against such important/widely-used part of the linux userspace? I do find Guix as cool as NixOS, but this decision seems like a self-inflicted wound. Nonetheless, I should definitely get to know the project more, because it was some time ago I tried it last. So, Good luck with the project! :)

I agree, it could be seen as a self-inflicted wound.

I'm a Guix developer but I still use Guix on Debian for important deployments, mainly because of systemd / journald.

But, we could also think of it as an opportunity. Well, I hope you'll find Guix useful and enjoyable, and maybe even help us improve it :)

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#242

Post by pimeys » Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 7:44 AM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #240

pimeys wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a month, diving directly into the deep end with flakes and all. I don't know, it really is hard in the beginning. Like, really hard. But eventually I got myself a setup I could use in my two laptops and workstation. A setup, that sets my home directory, all my programs and my custom desktop just the way I want. Everything is in the github repo, and installing with the flake will give me the exact experience I h…

"It's hard to grasp things" is only one part of the problem. I mentioned that there's no good way to understand nixpkgs except to manually traverse the file tree. Grokking the directory scheme will help a bit, but there's no amount of Nix Nirvana that will make it as easy as hovering over the parameter in VS Code. In other cases, things are just broken--my nix installed rustup is failing to build packages this mornin…

I get your problems, and I agree with you this is not always great.

I'm mostly writing Rust, so as long as I have `libssl` available, I don't really need to tweak my system that much to be able to work. I definitely would reconsider, if my work would involve using Python...

Although, I'm kind of interested about the challenge of understanding the packaging of these dependencies you're talking about. Making the whole compilation setup nice and clean with nix. But, I don't know, I get it it's not for everybody. And it also might be these lockdowns that put me to this mode of doing stuff such as tweaking NixOS.

Then, again, computers are my hobby. And new challenge is always accepted!

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#243

Post by Wazzymandias » Tue, Apr 20, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #219

Wazzymandias wrote: post #176

Nothing should be labeled as the ultimate devops toolkit when its documentation is as atrocious as nix People can commend it as much as they want, but the steep learning curve is largely self inflicted because of their resistance to writing clean, comprehensive, up to date docs It has also led to the community being filled with a lot of arrogance and pretentiousness I wouldn't run nix in production because of the lac…

Any concrete reason you call such a niche, but large community toxic?

It's been mostly from personal experience, though I shouldn't generalize to the community as a whole.

Anecdotally my experience with nix community has been unpleasant. They're very resistant to suggestions and offer little in terms of guidance or documentation.