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NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

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Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#3
I'm still in the 'meh' camp for flakes. I use niv and it gives me enough usability.

I find the need to include additional libraries to make flakes usable for some reason a weird hurdle I don't personally enjoy (i.e. flake-parts or systems)

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#4
> With the goal of ending this current limbo and soothe longstanding tensions in the Nix community

Can someone with more background give a quick explanation about why is this a source of tension in the nix community in the first place? Is this a situation of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#5
post #3

I'm still in the 'meh' camp for flakes. I use niv and it gives me enough usability. I find the need to include additional libraries to make flakes usable for some reason a weird hurdle I don't personally enjoy (i.e. flake-parts or systems)

The thing I actually love about Flakes is the fact that my immutable system configuration now also contains the versions of dependencies, instead of them being in some out-of-band special area. This is super nice for rollbacks and just general visibility.

It's even more of a plus that it is aware of Git and makes rather surprisingly intelligent decisions when automatically upgrading the system on a schedule (as one example, it seems to be able to deal with when the Git repository has staged or unstaged changes just fine, producing commits with just the lockfile changes.)

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#6
post #4

> With the goal of ending this current limbo and soothe longstanding tensions in the Nix community Can someone with more background give a quick explanation about why is this a source of tension in the nix community in the first place? Is this a situation of too many cooks in the kitchen or something else?

Because Flakes are simultaneously discouraged and labeled as unfinished, yet used by many.

Some aspects of Flakes are a bit contentious. For example, official adoption of Flakes will mean Nix will no longer be a mono-repository. Plus, Flakes are tightly coupled to Git.

However, Flakes bring welcome improvements to longstanding issues. Most notably, package pinning and explicit versioning, which are problematic when using channels.

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#7
I wanted to switch to nixos but current segregation between flakes and (traditional) nix features was a huge stop sign for me. Seems like this move is a good sign resolving this issue. Hope they bring things nice together -- features, doc, the community etc.

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#8
Ive always loved the idea of nix, but feel like I've read numerous, if not horror, at least uncomfortable stories about the actual real-world experience after the initial "setup yak shaving" is done - which is often exciting for "us", it's the new project problem solving part before it falls into the boring "work" part.

If I have an arch system now, how useful is it to use Nix or Homemanager on a non-nixos linux system? I dont really want to dump a working system and duel booting always has whatever you need on the other system.

Do you get anything when not using NixOS to manage everything? What good is it if half my system is installed by pacman, half by asdf-per-project and the rest by nix? Has anyone gone down this route? What is the actual lived experience of half-assing it?

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#9
post #7

I wanted to switch to nixos but current segregation between flakes and (traditional) nix features was a huge stop sign for me. Seems like this move is a good sign resolving this issue. Hope they bring things nice together -- features, doc, the community etc.

I just started using flakes like a year and a half ago for my configs (easy nixpkgs pinning in git was worth it). No issues so far - take the plunge!

Re: NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally

#10
post #3

I'm still in the 'meh' camp for flakes. I use niv and it gives me enough usability. I find the need to include additional libraries to make flakes usable for some reason a weird hurdle I don't personally enjoy (i.e. flake-parts or systems)

Luckily, you can still use niv! I still am for certain projects. It works so well for what it does. Flakes give a little more ofc.
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