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Nix and NixOS, my pain points

remy.grunblatt.org

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Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#51

Post by xrd »

I agree with all the points in this post.

And, I love NixOS. It's really special and very different than the other Linux I've used for 20 years.

I have been curious to try Guix at some point. Does anyone know if there is a good comparison write-up?

Also, can anyone speculate why the community has had such a hard time documenting this incredible technology? There are great posts like this from Xe: https://xeiaso.net/ but not generally getting started guides that are up to date. Why is this so hard to do? I mean, I'm not doing it because I personally feel like everything I do to get something working on Nix is a quasi-hack and not the standard and most up-to-date way to do it, so I'm hesitant to share. But, surely there are experts that like to write. Is this a problem with a simple technology solution (choose a better documentation tool)?

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#52

Post by masklinn »

40yearoldman wrote: post #3
tsuujin wrote: post #2

I switched my personal dotfiles to nix recently, and the “poor documentation “ comment here really hits home. Trying to learn /how to use/ nix was awful. I found lots of guides, almost always incomplete, and oftentimes directly contradicting each other. It took me weeks to get a working build and much of that time was anything but fun. I like the outcome, and I’m glad I took the time now, but it was a slog that I don…

I keep reading, this, and keeping being told this. Yet I switched every system over to nix and have found no thing but the best examples documentation and help from nix to do so. Within the span of a afternoon and a bit a reading I went from zero, to a script that lets me setup an entire dev systems with just a few commands in a vm, and or even on hardware. If anything the Nix documentation is just as good as every o…

> It's a language, and thus the language has may expressions that result in the same outcome.

First it's a distribution and a package manager, and the guidance regarding these is sub-par. Especially with what there is of documentation being split between the old and new UIs, then being told about flakes but that they're experimental so it's not clear whether you should or should not use them.

I just went to the nix website, clicked "first steps with nix" and I get https://nixos.org/guides/ad-hoc-developer-environments.html

Is that useful? I'm sure to somebody who already knows what they want out of nix it is, but the first thing I'm told is that shell environments exist and are useful to "use the tool without having to install the software.". Ok, but what if I want to install the software? Then there's listing of what's essentially a magical invocation out of nowhere:

    $ nix-shell -p 'python38.withPackages (packages: [ packages.django ])'
I can understand that (or at least reach what I assume is an understanding), but there's no real explanation to give me knowledge to expand upon, if anything the explanations are worse than useless:

> We create an ad hoc environment with $PYTHONPATH set and python available, along with the django package.

thank you very much, that confirms I'd about interpreted the line correctly, but you've not told me what `withPackages` is or where `packages.django` comes out of so I'm not really helped.

And apparently the next step is "declarative and reproducible developer environments", or possibly "towards reproducibility: pinning Nixpkgs"? Or even better, "To quickly setup a Nix project read through Getting started Nix template", I have no clue what a nix project is or why I'd want one.

There's not just a step missing here, there's an entire floor, possibly building. It's like the nix community saw how git is taught and went "we can do worse".

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#53

Post by Manuel_D »

xrd wrote: post #51

I agree with all the points in this post. And, I love NixOS. It's really special and very different than the other Linux I've used for 20 years. I have been curious to try Guix at some point. Does anyone know if there is a good comparison write-up? Also, can anyone speculate why the community has had such a hard time documenting this incredible technology? There are great posts like this from Xe: https://xeiaso.net/…

I think the issue is that there's just so much to document. I worked my way through the Nix pills, and understood the language and philosophy. But then doing anything productive with it is just way bigger than I can get my head around. It's like the joke about drawing an owl: https://i.imgur.com/rCr9A.png

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#54

Post by toastal »

pshirshov wrote: post #49
toastal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say I've had merge requests denied because I used the title "xxx: init @ 1.0.0" instead of "xxx: init at 1.0.0", but when upgrading packages you must use a symbol, either "->" or "→", but initialization doesn't allow a symbol. Nitpicky but fine, I update the commit title and I wait 2 months for approval+merge. There's also a long disconnect between approved vs. merged in general; I currently have 2 or 3 merge r…

That's exactly what I'm talking about and I don't see any point in making any contributions there. I just feel better maintaining my own private fork.

I've had to resort to doing the same a lot of the time as I await the merge process. Even after merge, it may take Hydra 3 days to get your changes from the default branch to even nixos-unstable for general usage. I find a fork a bit easier than piling overlays and forgetting to move on from them.

My favorite was when the GNOME ISOs got so bloated it no longer fit on a DVD size-wise and nothing could move to unstable for over a week while folks hem and hawed about what to do with that situation. Not saying a little bikeshedding + solution digging isn't good for the long-term, but it seemed so odd that this was preventing anything from going to unstable. (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/159612)

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#55

Post by anon291 »

xrd wrote: post #51

I agree with all the points in this post. And, I love NixOS. It's really special and very different than the other Linux I've used for 20 years. I have been curious to try Guix at some point. Does anyone know if there is a good comparison write-up? Also, can anyone speculate why the community has had such a hard time documenting this incredible technology? There are great posts like this from Xe: https://xeiaso.net/…

Realistically, the nix community is made up of a lot of functional programmers. I realize the nix language seems confusing to many, but to fp programmers, it's intuitive and there's not a whole lot to say about it.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#57

Post by toastal »

delroth wrote: post #25
scoopertrooper wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use a tutorial when ChatGPT has you covered? > How do I create a nix package that clones eMacs from GitHub and builds it from source? { pkgs ? import {}, fetchFromGitHub }: let emacsSrc = fetchFromGitHub { owner = "emacs-mirror"; repo = "emacs"; rev = "master"; sha256 = "0xabcd1234"; }; in pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "emacs"; version = "27.1"; src = emacsSrc; buildInputs = [ pkgs.autoconf pkgs.make ]; confi…

As usual for ChatGPT this is full of mistakes and bad code. The buildPhase and installPhase it writes are completely unnecessary and worse than the default, the configurePhase might work in some cases but most likely won't, and it's unnecessary when instead autoreconfHook should be used, stdenv/autoconf should be taken as an argument for the function returning the derivation, autoconf should be a nativeBuildInput, ma…

You're also supposed to call the pre and post hooks for these phases.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#58

Post by gtaylor »

pshirshov wrote: post #48
lom wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This couldn’t be any further from my experience. Instead of being told fuck off, I was offered (and later offered when I became a maintainer myself) constructive criticism, often times with the patches, required to make it up to standard, included. > maintainer says the old package works for him We’re all just volunteers, who are doing this in our free time. Usually this works well enough for most packages, but you a…

> can't be any further Probably you are lucky. > always free to submit I did. The problem is that in this particular case there is one guy with merge rights who doesn't want to update a package because it breaks something for him so the package is outdated by years. He provided me an excerpt from his logs and said that the update doesn't work for him. Period. They don't even think that the outdated package doesn't wo…

Which package was it?

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#59

Post by nalllar »

pshirshov wrote: post #15

The real pain points are: 1) Abysmal contributor experience 2) Lack of typing in nix language and very limited debugging capabilities 3) Lack of interface concept in nix language 4) Lack of any markings on dependency graph edge 5) (3) and (4) makes impossible to have anything alike to gentoo's slots. Nix might be the only right way of doing slotting but it's effectively incapable of that.

Contributor experience for nixpkgs has been better than my typical experience with other projects, once I learned the flow.

Scale of the repo and massive numbero of new PRs makes it easy for PRs to get lost and not reviewed, if you're having trouble with that you want to ask for help either on the PRs awaiting review thread on the nixos discourse or the matrix dev channel.

Re: Nix and NixOS, my pain points

#60

Post by pxc »

prox wrote: post #33
kstenerud wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you are a superhuman. I too went through weeks of pain and suffering to get my nixos hypervisor running, and if I were to lose my script and have to start from scratch again, I'd just install Debian instead. I would never recommend nixos to anyone. The concept is awesome, but the execution is terrible.

What I often find is this “ought to know” treshold. Parent comment user is probably familiar with lingo you are not. Documentation often assumes a certain level and a writer does not imagine a less capable user.

Yes, the Nix community has great reference docs for people who already know how things work, for most things imo. At the same time, it isn't always obvious enough where to find a good introduction to terms and concepts used. But materials of that kind are increasingly available and general gaps are being filled with a lot of focus lately.
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