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Nix Team Creation

discourse.nixos.org

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Re: Nix Team Creation

#31

Post by eptcyka »

kaba0 wrote: post #28
outworlder wrote: post #16

My experience with NixOS is: if whatever I want to do is covered by the documentation, I just need to add the necessary enchantments (often verbatim) from the documentation and things _just work_. It certainly takes way less time to do compared to any distribution I've ever used. It's trivial to undo mistakes and I don't have to write down what I did - the code replaces my notes entirely. However, if I can't find wha…

> like software packaged as Wine bottles I always wondered why there are no wine packages using nix. Sure, it is likely not legal, but I would absolutely love to have an MS office package that mandates a specific hashed file (that I can torrent and add to the nix store - this way I don’t even risk viruses), and the install itself is deterministically done (perhaps with some headless GUI clicking here and there).

Windows application installers generally are just binary blobs that can do as they please, so just pinning an installer will not imply that the resulting installation will be deterministic - a lot of installers by design change the global state of the system and download stuff during the installation process. If you want packaged on Windows, try choco.

Edit: fixing autocorrect typos.

Re: Nix Team Creation

#32

Post by Smaug123 »

eptcyka wrote: post #31
kaba0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like software packaged as Wine bottles I always wondered why there are no wine packages using nix. Sure, it is likely not legal, but I would absolutely love to have an MS office package that mandates a specific hashed file (that I can torrent and add to the nix store - this way I don’t even risk viruses), and the install itself is deterministically done (perhaps with some headless GUI clicking here and there).

Windows application installers generally are just binary blobs that can do as they please, so just pinning an installer will not imply that the resulting installation will be deterministic - a lot of installers by design change the global state of the system and download stuff during the installation process. If you want packaged on Windows, try choco. Edit: fixing autocorrect typos.

(You probably mean Choco, short for Chocolatey, by the way, just in case anyone gets confused.)

Re: Nix Team Creation

#33

Post by amelius »

I'm trying to get Nix to compile software against host-system provided cuda libraries (and the libc those libraries are dependent on), for a Jetson ARM-based system. So I'm trying to create overrides for these basic libraries based on tar'ed system libraries. Has anyone tried to use Nix this way?

Re: Nix Team Creation

#34

Post by ParetoOptimal »

aidenn0 wrote: post #27
parminya wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree that the documentation is a problem. A lot of the code is commented, so if you can find a package in nixpkgs that is using the same language, you can usually do some copypaste, somehow find the function definition it's referencing, and then it's not so hard to make the changes to package your new package. But "somehow find the function definition it's referencing" is not always as easy as it sounds.…

This is generally true, but I have yet to successfully make a nix overlay for any haskell package not already in nixpkgs. I can't make heads-nor-tails of how the haskell packaging works, other than forking nixpkgs and rerunning the scripts that generate the packages from cabal.

Try this:

https://github.com/Gabriella439/haskell-nix

and for nix in general this recent tutorial:

https://nix.dev/tutorials/nix-language

Re: Nix Team Creation

#35

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

eptcyka wrote: post #31
kaba0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like software packaged as Wine bottles I always wondered why there are no wine packages using nix. Sure, it is likely not legal, but I would absolutely love to have an MS office package that mandates a specific hashed file (that I can torrent and add to the nix store - this way I don’t even risk viruses), and the install itself is deterministically done (perhaps with some headless GUI clicking here and there).

Windows application installers generally are just binary blobs that can do as they please, so just pinning an installer will not imply that the resulting installation will be deterministic - a lot of installers by design change the global state of the system and download stuff during the installation process. If you want packaged on Windows, try choco. Edit: fixing autocorrect typos.

Should work for portable apps, or anything else that's distributed as an archive that can be directly extracted and work

(So AIUI a tiny fraction of the available software. Still, it's not nothing.)

Re: Nix Team Creation

#36

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

nvln wrote: post #12
n42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I use flakes or not? Every single library I find is a Nix Flake, but insists that Flakes are experimental. Who makes the decision that they are not experimental? At what point does majority adoption of flakes overrule? Why are they still behind a feature flag in the CLI? What is Nickel? Is this an officially endorsed project? It’s run by Tweag — do they run Nix? Most core contributors work for Tweag. What is t…

SEO for Nix is kinda hard unless they decide to change the name. I've resorted to searching github with `extension:nix`, the forum and the manual directly.

I find "nixos" works well, even when I don't mean the Linux distro. YMMV.

(And yes, I absolutely agree that if we could go back in time and change it to pretty much anything else that would be better.)

Re: Nix Team Creation

#38

Post by striking »

hakre wrote: post #22
striking wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this case, "it's experimental" should be read as "maybe the team will decide to make changes", rather than "it's not going to work half the time". In that case, I can't in good conscience recommend we use such a feature at my workplace. We can't afford huge breaking changes, which is what that flag suggests. Which means my workplace is stuck with a bunch of `shell.nix` and `direnv` magic instead of clean flake-b…

AFAIK you don't have to use flakes. Same as it's fine to only use shell.nix. No system is for eternity, nix builds are deterministically cached, often never reproduced, so I see no strong arguments against using direnv with shell.nix.

No, we don't have to use them, but they have lots of advantages and lots of support from the community that we just can't tap into.

Re: Nix Team Creation

#39

Post by 0x457 »

nonbirithm wrote: post #17
rgoulter wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should I use flakes or not? Every single library I find is a Nix Flake, but insists that Flakes are experimental. In this case, "it's experimental" should be read as "maybe the team will decide to make changes", rather than "it's not going to work half the time". e.g. one change they made was changing the property "defaultPackage" to "packages.default". (Anyway, the UX improvements from flakes are good, that once y…

>> Should I use flakes or not? Every single library I find is a Nix Flake, but insists that Flakes are experimental. > In this case, "it's experimental" should be read as "maybe the team will decide to make changes", rather than "it's not going to work half the time". This I think is part of the problem. People see the "experimental" label and don't understand that it's not "experimental" in the sense they're used to…

Well, it is experimental. Experimental rarely means "It's not going to work and might delete your data" that what, ironically, alpha and beta mean.

Re: Nix Team Creation

#40

Post by Arcuru »

rgoulter wrote: post #11
n42 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I use flakes or not? Every single library I find is a Nix Flake, but insists that Flakes are experimental. Who makes the decision that they are not experimental? At what point does majority adoption of flakes overrule? Why are they still behind a feature flag in the CLI? What is Nickel? Is this an officially endorsed project? It’s run by Tweag — do they run Nix? Most core contributors work for Tweag. What is t…

> Should I use flakes or not? Every single library I find is a Nix Flake, but insists that Flakes are experimental. In this case, "it's experimental" should be read as "maybe the team will decide to make changes", rather than "it's not going to work half the time". e.g. one change they made was changing the property "defaultPackage" to "packages.default". (Anyway, the UX improvements from flakes are good, that once y…

The Nix team doesn't allow any community proposals for making changes to Flakes because it is still 'experimental' and hasn't yet gone through an RFC. So it's 'experimental' in the sense that it might change, but the people who have suggested changes to the design are generally told that they won't discuss changes because it's not yet stabilized.

That kind of circular reasoning seems problematic.

Don't get me wrong, I like flakes, I use them for my NixOS setup, but the way that flakes development has been handled is very concerning.

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