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My First Impressions of Nix

mtlynch.io

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Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#221

Post by II2II »

thumbuddy wrote: post #107
adamgordonbell wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explaining what Nix is seems like one of its biggest barriers to adoption. Part of the difficulty is it means different things to different people. My colleague spent a whole lot of time trying to answer this question and ended up with this: My main take away after spending some time learning about Nix is that it embraces the functional programming concept of a pure function. If I give a function a certain set of inp…

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…

Based upon how I manage my system, Nix appears to be something that I could use productively. The problem isn't so much of them being able to explain what the tool is, but one of them being instilling confidence that it lives up to their claims. We exist, after all, in an industry of hyperbole. It also doesn't help that their solution is layered on top of an operating system that has traditionally been managed in a very different way.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#222

Post by kertoip_1 »

That's funny, I've gone through almost exactly the same path trying to use NixOS. Tried on VirtualBox and failed. Tried on Raspberry Pi than failed. Didn't have spare bare metal, so I ended up on a "failed" state for now

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#223

Post by rekado »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #167
awegio wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Node packages work much better Are you sure about that? I haven't seen a node app built from source on nixpkgs yet. That includes Electron apps like Signal Desktop, which is a bit disappointing. There is this article about trying to package jQuery on Guix: http://dustycloud.org/blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/

Yes, buildNpmPackage works great.

Guix has several different npm importers (none of them merged), but it's debatable whether it is desirable to build npm packages from source when it either creates thousands of barely useful packages.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#224

Post by [deleted] »

hamandcheese wrote: post #213
lolinder wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think the thrust of the parent comment was more that the test coverage of this package isn't good, not that semver must be followed.

[deleted]

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#225

Post by rowanG077 »

dottedmag wrote: post #204
rowanG077 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With FHS I'd say it does 3 also.

FHS makes it more similar, but not compatible. I'll quote from my blog post linked above: > Different distributions make different choices, and therefore they are closely related operating systems, but not a single OS. Even Linux syscall interface subtly changes from distribution to distribution, as they pick and choose options to build their kernels. > Every niche Linux distribution that does not follow the interfac…

That's just not true. Nixpkgs has the largest package database of any distribution. It contains many closed source application that work flawlessly. Hell I can even run Vivado or Quartus on it which are two of the worst of the worst proprietary pieces of software on it. I also have packaged proprietary libraries for hardware we use at my company with no issues.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#226

Post by prox »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #164
prox wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does this allow for different boot setups for NixOS? Say “webserver” or “office management” , “media streamer” profiles?

Yes. E.g. some guy's config with 6 different machines[1]: multiple desktops, laptops, servers, a Raspberry Pi, and a VPS. That's a rather advanced use of Nix for configuration, but definitely shows what it's capable of. [1] https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config

Wow! Really impressive.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#227

Post by lolinder »

hamandcheese wrote: post #213
lolinder wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think the thrust of the parent comment was more that the test coverage of this package isn't good, not that semver must be followed.

Ah, fair enough, I misunderstood. I thought the tests they were recommending were tests to ensure backwards-compatibility between version bumps, I didn't realize they were talking about the downstream pacakge's tests.

I still disagree with the insinuation that it's everyone else who's screwing up and if we all did things the way Nix wants us to then Nix would actually work just fine. That's just another way of saying Nix doesn't work in the real world.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#228

Post by kaba0 »

thumbuddy wrote: post #158
SuperSandro2000 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have written software that would have been 100% not package-able any other way.

Also, let’s not lie to ourselves, there are plenty of ridiculous contraptions out there, like docker-images used for ML that take up some insane space, and are updated each day. Packaging is a hard problem, and there is finally a tool that can actually solve it.

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#229

Post by pxc »

mtlynch wrote: post #116
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…

Author here. Thanks for the clarification! I'm still new to Nix, so I'm trying to share useful things I'm learning without overstepping my expertise and saying wrong things. My mental model of Nix was that if I'm in system state A, which is the result of performing task X + Y, and I want to get to system state B, which is the result of task X + Y + Z, then Nix would recognize that it's already in state A, so it only…

Yep!

Nix builds don't know anything about state, and they work just like you describe. Nix builds power basically everything you do with Nix.

But for 'installing' packages, more happens than just creating builds and leaving them somewhere in /nix/store. In those cases, you also have a profile manager (nix-env, `nix profile`, nixos-rebuild, darwin-rebuild, home-managwr) which builds a symlink forest (pointing into the Nix store) that represents your complete configuration. That forest is called a profile generation, and represents how, e.g., your user's Nix profile was configured that particular time. (When you perform a rollback, your profile manager is just setting the current profile to a previous generation.)

Each generation of your profile has an activation script (and some profile managers may also have some bit of profile activation logic of their own, idk). That activation script may have to perform some state management, e.g., restarting a service or telling the service manager (systemd on Linux or launchd with Nix-Darwin) to reread its configuration files to recognize the availability of a new service.

This little bit of state management is hopefully as minimal as it can be. In fact, it's generally expected/communally enforced that Nix packages have to work normally when run directly from their respective residences in /nix/store, without having been installed into any kind of profile at all!

So during normal daily Nix usage, I've never really had to think about it. If you want to implement or contribute to a profile manager, you'll have to!

Re: My First Impressions of Nix

#230

Post by kaba0 »

xxpor wrote: post #219
duped wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Run the nix installer Ok and this requires root access, sets up some global directories under root, and a new user. Me as the administrator: why the hell do I need a new user and what is the nix store and what are the conditions that mutate it? (I know the answers to this question, but it's a barrier for people who give a shit). > Enable flakes What the fuck is a flake? Reads a bit... what the fuck is a derivation?…

Almost everything here is valid, but iirc the last time I ran the nix installer I thought it offered a home directory based install now that doesn't require root.

You can use in theory something other than /nix, but then you have to recompile everything yourself. So not many people do if, not sure about it’s state.
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