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My First Impressions of Nix

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Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#31

Post by bandrami »

p-e-w wrote: post #13

I've occasionally encountered projects using Nix, and I've casually browsed the Nix and NixOS websites, but I still don't have a clear idea of what Nix is. Is it a package manager? A build system? An operating system? A container platform? A sandbox? An automation tool? Which widely used, existing software tools is it analogous to?

It's maybe best described as a software ecosystem, which has the unfortunate problem that the programming language it uses and the package/deploy tools written in that programming language share the name "Nix". Nix the language (basically a customized version of Standard ML) is used to write package and OS definitions that Nix the tool uses to actually build and deploy software, containers, and operating systems. The "ecosystem" bit comes from the fact that the language is used to write the package/deploy definitions, and a large community of users have assembled a rather good and up-to-date set of package definitions, and these have been bundled together as an operating system, and these all share the rubric "Nix".

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#32

Post by microtonal »

p-e-w wrote: post #13

I've occasionally encountered projects using Nix, and I've casually browsed the Nix and NixOS websites, but I still don't have a clear idea of what Nix is. Is it a package manager? A build system? An operating system? A container platform? A sandbox? An automation tool? Which widely used, existing software tools is it analogous to?

It confuses a lot of people, because Nix breaks down the boundaries of what we traditionally see as separate tools. If you have a sufficiently powerful language to describe how to build things, you can build packages, container images, operating systems, etc. with it. Probably the closest equivalent outside Nix/Guix is Bazel or Buck (not the same, but they have many overlapping goals).

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#34

Post by colordrops »

FpUser wrote: post #21

I have shell script with bunch of common functions to simplify particular tasks and then main script that when ran installs all needed packages, creates / copies various config files, pulls my C++ code from repo and builds my servers and installs those as daemons. It also installs cron jobs that execute backups / replication. It is smart enough to skip already performed steps and can safely run multiple times. It can…

That is awesome and I'm glad it works for you. Nix does a lot of other things as well, and also has a large package repo and community around it.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#35

Post by madjam002 »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #26

I feel a little lost on nixos. Been using it for a while now on my main personal desktop and it's fine, but whenever I want to do something like running a python project (ml based ones for example), or compile software from source, I'm lost because I don't know what I'm doing. Most projects target Ubuntu, so I feel you need to know a lot about how nix really works to get them compiling, which is often not what I'm in…

I've used Nix for 5 years now and use it heavily in production, and in my opinion, just do what works for you. If you try and use Nix 100% "correctly" then you'll end up like the countless other people who tried Nix and failed.

Especially for toying around in dev environments, be pragmatic and take advantage of its amazing strengths, but if distrobox lets you enjoy using NixOS and speed up your workflow, so be it.

Heck I'm spinning up some services in production just now and I'm reaching for Docker Compose as that's how the vendor officially supports deploying their software. Turns out NixOS can still bring some benefits to a Docker Compose workflow, deploying it via a systemd service, config managed in Nix, it's not as nice as building the service entirely in a Nix derivation and deploying it natively, but it's still better than without NixOS.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#36

Post by nickcox »

p-e-w wrote: post #13

I've occasionally encountered projects using Nix, and I've casually browsed the Nix and NixOS websites, but I still don't have a clear idea of what Nix is. Is it a package manager? A build system? An operating system? A container platform? A sandbox? An automation tool? Which widely used, existing software tools is it analogous to?

> Is it a package manager? A build system? An operating system? A container platform? A sandbox? An automation tool?

Yes

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#37

Post by scandinavian »

Now that we have another Nix post, maybe someone can enlighten me about something I've been wondering about.

I'm one of the maintainers of a popular django application. Someone made a nix package of the project, but we've now twice gotten invalid bug reports from people using the package because the package depends on "django_4" and whenever someone updates that nix package, the package for our project breaks.

Of course we, like all other python projects, don't support using other dependency versions then the ones in the requirements.txt file. So when someone just uses a different minor version of django, stuff breaks. What's the disconnect here? Why does all nix packages that use django_4 need to use the same version, that seems super prone to breaking all kinds of stuff. Same for the other 35+ dependencies that run arbitrary versions instead of the ones defined in the requirements.txt file.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#38

Post by mteigers »

lvncelot wrote: post #7

I'm a huge fan of Nix, and I'm glad to have stuck with the often times daunting process of getting into it - and I have to agree with the author's point regarding the documentation. That's not a fault of the people who actually did sit down and document their process, or distill their learning path into a tutorial - I myself understand it well enough to use it, but not well enough to really explain it without confusi…

I'm curious if you have any pointers for whole Mac config with nix-darwin. This is something I've just started looking at and at the moment don't have much more than a nix-shell with some nice-to-haves. Any tips / tricks / guides are greatly appreciated.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#39

Post by dottedmag »

> Using VS Code Remote SSH on NixOS systems

This is the main of issue with Nix and other niche distributions: they are new operating systems, with their set of file layouts, package managers, and even syscall variations.

Linux ecosystem is awfully fragmented. If you ever want to use any software outside of your not-very-well-walled-garden provided by distribution authors, you have to hope your operating system (that is, distro) is sufficiently similar to one of few distros software authors have built and QAed their software on.

I have written at length about it here: https://dottedmag.net/blog/linux-is-not-os/

I wish for a system that:

1. provides declarative configuration.

2. allows for easy local patching.

3. is ABI-compatible with a major distro.

Alas. Fedora Bluesilver delivers 1 and 3. Gentoo provides 2. NixOS provides 1 and 3.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#40

Post by henrydark »

microtonal wrote: post #24
hamandcheese wrote: post #8

> Nix, on the other hand, does have a concept of state. If you make a one-line change to a 200-line Nix configuration, it doesn’t have to re-do all the work from the other 199 lines. It can evaluate the state of the system against the configuration file and recognize that it just has to apply the one-line change. And that change usually happens in a few seconds. The author seems to have some misguided ideas about Nix…

Just to elaborate a bit for those not familiar to Nix (slightly simplified to exclude recent support for content addressing). Nix work with derivations, a derivation is basically a data structure that specifies how a package is built. Derivations are normally not created by hand but using a function (eg. stdenv.mkDerivation ). When you ask Nix to build a package, it hashes a normalized form of derivation data structu…

I agree with everything but the last statement. This all comes down to: do you consider memoization to be state.

I predict people's answers to this question will come from experience with memoization. Here's mine: I kept trying to get nix to build tensorflow locally, so that I would get the avx512 benefits of the big, but gpu-less machine I had. I hadn't realized some other derivation had already downloaded tensorflow from online cache, so didn't have avx512 enabled. I kept making shells, trying tensorflow, seeing it doesn't have support. The solution was to tell nix to disregard the nix store, in order to force the local build. This experience has left me with the concrete feeling that the nix store is full-on state, and I the user must be aware of it.

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