> Welcome! It's great to see that you're interested in Nix.
I sure am! What is Nix?
Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
91–100 of 227 posts
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#92Just my two cents: Nix doesn’t guarantee “reproducible”, just “repeatable”. (I think it’s helpful to keep these technical concepts distinct, and to introduce the right terminology when teaching, since it makes elaboration easier in the future.)
Can you elaborate? From what I understand, Nix packages are mostly reproducible as they are running great lengths for that, to the point where every time in Nix land is the exact same.
Not bit-for-bit reproducible. Package builds can be nondeterministic, binaries can have embedded timestamps (e.g, build time), and so on.
They should be semantically equivalent, but it's not fully guaranteed.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#93Just my two cents: Nix doesn’t guarantee “reproducible”, just “repeatable”. (I think it’s helpful to keep these technical concepts distinct, and to introduce the right terminology when teaching, since it makes elaboration easier in the future.)
These two words have the same meaning
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#94Off topic, but I wonder if the authors of zero-to-nix.com are aware that their project name actually reads quite funny for German speakers (as "Nix" in German also means Zero)
The original author is Dutch. In Dutch, "niks" (same pronunciation as Nix), actually means "nothing". His nickname is niksnut, which means "good-for-nothing".
> His nickname is niksnut, which means "good-for-nothing".
In german that would be Nichtsnutz. Would the english word deadbeat mean the same?
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may not be a fad, but there's a lot of rose-colored hype that masks a world of tedium. New prospective users should be prepared for a lot of uphill grind with respect to configuring packages or defining their own packages. Every time I try to do seemingly simple tasks in Nix, I end up spending hours on the Nix discord channel trying to work out a solution with seasoned users (who invariably struggle to work out a…
I feel like Nix is worth it for me at this point, but I've definitely been through some of the pain described. This is a tough critique to hear for anyone who loves the project but I agree with the core of it (except the syntax issue). Worth reading for Nix people and prospective Nix users alike, imo.
Yeah, I don't want to rain on a parade; I think about it as opportunity for people who care about the project to rally around. I know plenty of people care about the user experience, but the current efforts seem kind of superficial and limited. It kind of feels like efforts are geared toward making Nix slightly better for its current user-base: individual, super-technical users who are really excited about package management and functional purity. Sadly, this misses out on Nix as a package manager for larger organizations (packaging their own software as well as configuring their hosts) as well as individual users who want the benefits of declarative systems but who don't want to learn a ton about package management, functional programming, Nix minutia, etc.
IMHO, it seems like there should be a UX working group that starts with broad scenarios and personas and develops a vision of what tooling should look like and works from there, rather than haphazard, incremental improvements on the current state of Nix tooling/workflows/etc. It could be interesting to look at how the Rust project makes big ambitious changes (they seem to do a really good job from my vantage point). Again, this is my view from afar as someone who has never run a big open source project and knows relatively little about package management (though thanks to Nix, much more than I ever wanted to know!).
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#96I would love to see a discussion from somebody who really likes Nix on why it isn't ready for prime time yet/just play devil's advocate aloud on why it isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I feel like I must not be doing anything "serious" enough to need package reproducibility at that high level. I'm aware of things like git checkout/tags, package-lock.json, Cargo.lock, Docker image tags.
What is a real world use case where Nix isn't overkill? I've read toolchains but... nvm (node version manager), rustup. I still Rust on a machine once and I never think about it again.
It feels like the Kubernetes of package management/build if you will complexity wise. "Do we really need this or is it just what everybody else is doing?"
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#97I'm glad this guide is focused on flakes. If you're starting out with Nix, forget about home-manager, nix-env, and the pre-flake configuration model.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should I invest time? It's not for everyone. Specifically, because Nix's 'costs' are upfront (for likely future benefit), nix isn't well suited to just-get-it-done pragmatic attitudes. -- e.g. if you'd prefer to just launch VMs from the web console, over using a tool like Terraform, then Nix isn't going to be for you. Nix isn't too difficult to use . I'd say it's 95% wonderful, 5% huge pain to deal with. (Writi…
How does Nix compare to Environment Modules: https://modules.sourceforge.net/ Am I correct in understanding they are similar, except Nix has the "pure" package building?
I'm not familiar with Environment Modules. I see they're popular in HPC?
One difference: On Nix's homepage (https://nixos.org), the first word which stands out is "reproducible". -- If I search the read the docs for "reproducible", the word shows up once. https://modules.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Not sure if there's anything recent, but links from this may be useful: https://github.com/freuk/awesome-nix-hpc
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#99I'm glad this guide is focused on flakes. If you're starting out with Nix, forget about home-manager, nix-env, and the pre-flake configuration model.
But what if I manage my home-manager configuration with flakes.
Re: Zero to Nix, an unofficial, opinionated, gentle introduction to Nix
#100What does opinionated mean is this case? I read through a bit and didn't see any strong opinions.
# What's opinionated about Zero to Nix Zero to Nix is opinionated because it advocates learning and using flakes and treating channels as deprecated. Zero to Nix also deviates from official recommendations in that it recommends installing Nix using Nix Installer rather than the official Nix installation script. https://zero-to-nix.com/about#whats-opinionated-about-zero-t...
To me using the word opinionated is a deterrent. Any time I hear the word opinionated used it usually means the opinion(s) expressed are overly strong, stubborn, and/or negative. I was expecting the guide to call out issues with the official documentation in a way that could upset the people working on the official docs. But this is just an alternative method. Hardly opinionated.