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20 years of Nix

20th.nixos.org

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Re: 20 years of Nix

#51

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

sbt567 wrote: post #49
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a valid concern. You read the nix pills and think you know what you're doing and then it turns out that the community has wrapped the things you've learned about in things you've never heard of, so you still can't learn from other people's repos.

This. I've been actively trying nix-based tooling on and off for my projects because it is legitimately solve the problem around sandboxing, versioning, reproducibility, consistency, etc. Recently, I'm trying to use asdf (and its faster alternative, rtx) and I keep telling myself "huh, nix could solve this problem better". But, damn it is infuriating to learn. Like other commenter said, it is the escape hatch that I'…

One thing that has helped somewhat is being more thorough in my exploration of repo's that are doing things that are similar to what I'm trying to do.

I want to use nix with a nim project, so I wrote a script that walks through all of the repo's in nimble (nim's package manager) and then filtered those for ones that had a flake.nix in the repo root.

Going through them was a helpful dose of context. It's like you gotta approach it from theory to practice and from practice to theory and eventually your efforts will meet in the middle. I think. I have glimmers of meeting in the middle happening.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#52

Post by password4321 »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #48
password4321 wrote: post #44

I tried to install NixOS using the live cd last week in a Hyper-V VM, but it failed to get anywhere due to SquashFS errors. That seemed pretty low-level so I'm putting it back on the back burner. User friendliness doesn't seem to be a top priority, and that's fine.

> I tried to install NixOS using the live cd last week in a Hyper-V VM, but it failed to get anywher e due to SquashFS errors. I'm curious what happened here because just a few weeks ago I was using a NixOS live-cd to rescue a botched gentoo VM on my windows machine (managed with Hyper-V manager). If you give it another shot, run into the issue again, and document it, the Nix community would almost certainly help you…

Thanks for sharing your counter-anecdata, I'll give it another shot.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#53

Post by troutwine »

tomberek wrote: post #24
amardeep wrote: post #4

I have been exploring nix for the past few months and my experience with nix has been both exhilarating and frustrating, simultaneously. On one hand, I find it hard to imagine not using nix now, but on the other hand, I hesitate to recommend it to other colleagues due to its steep learning curve, ux issues and potential for footguns. I sincerely hope that nix community improves the UX to make it more accessible to ne…

There are two sides to this problem, the first is to improve the UX, but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt. It is very tempting to only blame the first, but I think we need to also need to tell a better story and highlight the values in a better way. This would then give people a reason to get past the UX issues in the hopes of achieving those desired values. For example; peopl…

Two of the major differences between terraform and Nix that I see are 1. it’s possible to muddle through in terraform and 2. Hashicorp has put a non-trivial amount of effort into documentation for all levels of users. I’ve taken a stab at using Nix for Rust projects and could not even get to a point where I had something that functioned. I found plenty of material online but was it out of date, idiosyncratic, did it use flakes or not, etc etc? I suppose I could have contorted my existing project to meet the examples I found in various GitHub repos but my stuff is bog standard Rust so I don’t know that I’d be willing to. As for documentation, what should I, as a new and invested user, be looking for? Are flakes the future? Are they a distraction? Why are all the suggested docs I could find several year old guides on blogs? There’s 20 years of information floating around and the official project documentation, well, I don’t know who the audience is but it’s not learners.

It’s a shame. The promise of Nix/NixOS is really interesting — being able to deterministically create VMs with a custom user land is desirable to me — but in practice I can’t even get a simplistic project to compile, let alone something elaborate. Terraform is jank but it’s not a whole language that needs to be learned, seemingly, before the official docs start to become coherent in their underlying context.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#56

Post by Zurrrrr »

soraminazuki wrote: post #37
tomberek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two sides to this problem, the first is to improve the UX, but the second is to clearly describe a compelling reason for people to adopt. It is very tempting to only blame the first, but I think we need to also need to tell a better story and highlight the values in a better way. This would then give people a reason to get past the UX issues in the hopes of achieving those desired values. For example; peopl…

Agreed, reproducibility is only one aspect of Nix and doesn't quite capture the whole picture. That's why so many newcomers see Nix as nothing more than a Docker replacement. There's also too much misconceptions about Nix the language that's scaring people off. I'd like to see more being discussed about: * Its unique ability to treat packages as programmable data (i.e., derivations) * Its use case as a building block…

> Its unique ability to treat packages as programmable data (i.e., derivations)

How is this useful in practice?

Re: 20 years of Nix

#57

Post by tmountain »

striking wrote: post #45
thisismyswamp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would engineers need their environment shipped to them by a human?

Technically they `git pull` it themselves, but the fact that it continues to work involves a human.

Do they run NixOS or just use the package manager? What’s the host OS?

Re: 20 years of Nix

#58

Post by striking »

tmountain wrote: post #57
striking wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically they `git pull` it themselves, but the fact that it continues to work involves a human.

Do they run NixOS or just use the package manager? What’s the host OS?

They run macOS, pull a repo, run a setup script.

They get a multi-user Nix install with a direnv integration that boots up project-local daemons. Think Postgres, Redis, and so on; those are all available, along with the Nix packages the env needs, while their current working directory is that of a project folder.

Very few things live outside of the project, but the things that do are unfortunately stateful. We'll be solving that soon, too.

Re: 20 years of Nix

#59

Post by SirensOfTitan »

What I would like is to replace both Docker and docker compose for prod images and local dev, respectively for my team. Is this possible with nix today? It’s mostly a macOS box team.

I use nix flakes to manage my own configuration, but last time I played with building docker images on macOS I had to stand up a builder image on qemu or inside docker.

Further, I’ve historically run into friction between other package managers and nix. The poetry2nix and pnpm2nix kind of tools have a lot of friction [for example, private registry support for poetry is poor]. My current project has a dependency on xmlsec and it’s a bit cumbersome to handle building non wheels on M1.

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