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My First Impressions of Nix

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Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#151

Post by SuperSandro2000 »

mark38848 wrote: post #94
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…

Nix is only fast if your time has no value :D

It is not incredible fast and while it is running you can do something else like reading hackernews but there is definitely room for improvement and smart people are already thinking about that right now.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#152

Post by awelkie »

lillecarl wrote: post #146
thumbuddy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest barrier to adoption unfortunately is not people's inability to explain what the tool is in my opinion. It's that the tool is incredibly complicated, extremely hard to walk someone through compared to alternative projects, and honestly... In my opinion the problem it attempts to solve doesn't really exist. I'll take an "impure" os or package manager over a pure one any day if complexity is a thousand fold…

You don't have to manage your system with NixOS to reap the benefits of Nix. It solves very real problems that very much exist, it might not exist if you're a one-man show deploying WordPress to GoDaddy though. Barrier to entry: 1. Run the nix installer 2. Enable flakes 3. cd project 4. nix run This ensures you run the package with every dependency except the kernel pinned to a hashed version. If dependency hell is n…

Step two is not even necessary if you use zero-to-nix's installer. https://zero-to-nix.com/start/install

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#153

Post by lolinder »

SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #132
scandinavian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying, but nothing you said works in practice for python packages, so not sure that I actually learned anything. Is it fair to summize that python applications with python dependencies do not really work well as nix packages and shouldn't be used?

> Is it fair to summize that python applications with python dependencies do not really work well as nix packages and shouldn't be used? No, applications that are properly maintained work as they should and this can be ensured with tests and e2e tests.

This is such a condescending attitude. What you mean is applications that are maintained the way that you and the Nix developers think an application should be maintained.

It's incredibly naive for a package manager as ambitious as Nix to assume semver. I'm a big fan of semver myself, but the vast majority of software projects follow it imperfectly or not at all, and for good reason—it's nearly impossible to follow it perfectly, because even bugs are part of your API. Every project I've worked on has eventually had something break on a version upgrade because we were depending on something that was later decided to be a bug (but at the time was just how it worked).

Elm can mostly get away with enforcing semver because they designed it that way at the language level, but Nix wants to manage dependencies written in all languages and ecosystems, which have dramatically different versioning practices.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#154

Post by lloeki »

The problem the author hit with the Raspberry Pi is that the ARM image is meant for a standard environment (e.g UEFI ), like VMs.

e.g it'll boot on Fusion or kvm because they provide UEFI, a well known device tree, and don't require any firmware at that stage.

Pis (and many such ARM boards) don't have that so they won't be bootable. But there are Pi images built on Hydra. If one uses that then it boots right away.

It's all documented in the Nix wiki.

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM#Installation

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#155

Post by lostmsu »

madjam002 wrote: post #112
thumbuddy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could... You know... Not use Nix?

So give up all my baseline hardened VM configurations and go back to patchy Ansible scripts that leave the OS in a different state every time? No thanks

Are you keeping any of your configurations in a public place to use as a starting point?

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#156

Post by joshSzep »

SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #147
thumbuddy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest barrier to adoption unfortunately is not people's inability to explain what the tool is in my opinion. It's that the tool is incredibly complicated, extremely hard to walk someone through compared to alternative projects, and honestly... In my opinion the problem it attempts to solve doesn't really exist. I'll take an "impure" os or package manager over a pure one any day if complexity is a thousand fold…

> The biggest barrier to adoption unfortunately is not people's inability to explain what the tool is in my opinion. That's simple: nix is a package manager and the language used by the package manager, NixOS is a Linux distro. > It's that the tool is incredibly complicated, extremely hard to walk someone through compared to alternative projects, and honestly... In my opinion the problem it attempts to solve doesn't…

Nix vs not Nix seems like a parallel to Infrastructure As Code (terraform for example) vs Cowboying the AWS Console. Is that a fair comparison?

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#157

Post by thumbuddy »

lillecarl wrote: post #146
thumbuddy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest barrier to adoption unfortunately is not people's inability to explain what the tool is in my opinion. It's that the tool is incredibly complicated, extremely hard to walk someone through compared to alternative projects, and honestly... In my opinion the problem it attempts to solve doesn't really exist. I'll take an "impure" os or package manager over a pure one any day if complexity is a thousand fold…

You don't have to manage your system with NixOS to reap the benefits of Nix. It solves very real problems that very much exist, it might not exist if you're a one-man show deploying WordPress to GoDaddy though. Barrier to entry: 1. Run the nix installer 2. Enable flakes 3. cd project 4. nix run This ensures you run the package with every dependency except the kernel pinned to a hashed version. If dependency hell is n…

You're omitting the entire thing about learning how to write nix. Which is nightmare fuel even for FP fans.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#158

Post by thumbuddy »

SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #150
gonehome wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This matches my experience with it so far. Extremely complicated and hard to understand, projects that use it have builds fail anyway except now with very hard to debug errors.

> Extremely complicated and hard to understand That is absolutely not true. If you start to get the hang of it and follow the way things are supposed to be done then things get easier over time. You need to invest upfront more time into your configuration but on the long run it pays off and saves you from an entire error class. > projects that use it have builds fail anyway The point of Nix/NixOS is not to have no fa…

I've never seen it actually pay off in industry. I've seen it be used as good job security while other devs just wrote docker files and got things done.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#159

Post by thumbuddy »

joshSzep wrote: post #156
SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest barrier to adoption unfortunately is not people's inability to explain what the tool is in my opinion. That's simple: nix is a package manager and the language used by the package manager, NixOS is a Linux distro. > It's that the tool is incredibly complicated, extremely hard to walk someone through compared to alternative projects, and honestly... In my opinion the problem it attempts to solve doesn't…

Nix vs not Nix seems like a parallel to Infrastructure As Code (terraform for example) vs Cowboying the AWS Console. Is that a fair comparison?

Not really, unfortunately. In my opinion, Nix is more like using Haskell instead of whatever language your team is using to write software.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#160

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

globular-toast wrote: post #62
scandinavian wrote: post #37

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 cou…

> 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 That sounds wrong. A Python package should not have a requirements.txt file at all. A requirements.txt file is for "freezing" and fully reproducing an environment (ie. in a virtualenv or docker container).…

Django doesn't use semver. It uses a Major.Feature.Patch release notation, not Major.Minor.Patch. Feature releases usually contain breaking changes, where SemVer minor releases never should.
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