NixOS RFC 136 approved: A plan to stabilize the new CLI and Flakes incrementally • Hacker News Board

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

#11

Post by PuercoPop » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:34 AM UTC

nextos wrote: post #6

m1keil wrote: 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 u…

I use nix with flakes, have written a couple of flakes day to day use. I am not a nix power user. But based on my current understanding this statement seems incorrect

> Flakes are tightly coupled to Git.

How is it tightly coupled to Git if it supports Mercurial out of the box?

Other than using version control to determine what are the sources of the derivation, what does flakes lean on version control?

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

#12

Post by clhodapp » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:35 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #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 syst…

I use home-manager on Ubuntu on my work machine. You have to pay the full learning curve of Nix. Once you do, it works just fine. I think there comes a natural pressure to use Nix for as much as possible and slowly cut down one's dependency on the "base" system when you go this route. Maybe that's just because I want to see my investment in Nix pay off.

I would say that the biggest benefit you get is the hugeness and currentness of nixpkgs and the fact that it becomes a lot less important what software you have "installed".

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

#13

Post by pkulak » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #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 syst…

I don’t know the value of half-assing it, but committing your full ass is amazing. Don’t abandon a working system, but the next time you wait a whole three weeks to pacman -syu and your GPG keys are out of date and everything goes to hell… give it a shot.

Honestly, it’s Home Manager that really adds the maximum value, and getting all the way there takes a full weekend, but what were you gonna do anyway?

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

#14

Post by qbasic_forever » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:36 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #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 syst…

It's fine, just be sure you know where your tools are coming from (use the which command a lot when unsure). Nix might have more up to date or bleeding edge software, although since you're on arch in my experience nix can lag even arch by a little bit.

Fully reproducible environments with home manager and nixos are neat but IMHO you can just use ansible to do the same thing on debian, arch, etc. if those systems have the packages you need.

When you inevitably find software that isn't in nix (or are packaging your own software), be prepared to take a quantum leap in complexity as you now need to fully understand the nix language and its concepts like derivations. This isn't necessarily hard but it is not documented well at all, and there are factions in nix at odds with each other (flakes vs. nix-env) which make learning it even more confusing.

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

#15

Post by biggestlou » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:37 AM UTC

setheron wrote: 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)

Niv is fine and good but there's a lot that it will never provide, like the ability to `nix run` packages or `nix flake show` what your project provides with only a URL in hand.

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

#16

Post by solomonb » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:37 AM UTC

setheron wrote: 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)

You absolutely do not need flake-parts.

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

#17

Post by RaitoBezarius » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

m1keil wrote: 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?

For example, Flakes have no concept of cross compilation and makes this use case extremely tedious to use.

Flakes were a RFC then merged as an experimental feature and shilled too much to the community to the point they are now a quasi standardized feature even though they didn't go through RFC and therefore ignored all the valuable feedback.

This whole debacle made a lot of invested people tired on both sides.

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

#18

Post by nextos » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

PuercoPop wrote: post #11

nextos wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I use nix with flakes, have written a couple of flakes day to day use. I am not a nix power user. But based on my current understanding this statement seems incorrect > Flakes are tightly coupled to Git. How is it tightly coupled to Git if it supports Mercurial out of the box? Other than using version control to determine what are the sources of the derivation, what does flakes lean on version control?

I meant this kind of issue: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/can-i-use-flakes-within-a-git-...

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

#19

Post by RaitoBezarius » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:43 AM UTC

setheron wrote: 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)

I moved to npins which has slightly more features that niv.

But niv has been great, I wish we can have patching natively so all my tons of patches can be bolted on faster.

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

#20

Post by abathur » Sun, Aug 13, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

bongobingo1 wrote: post #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 syst…

It depends on what you're hoping to get out of it. I mostly-whole-ass it, but I still use the mac app store and homebrew for a few things. Most projects are Nix by this point.

It's hard to tell from how you say it; if you aren't using it for any projects and would just be using it for a slice of your system/user packages, I suspect you'll end up not really seeing what the fuss is about. If you will try to use it with some projects, I'd start there and see how it goes.

(It should be fairly low stakes. If it doesn't stick, you won't disrupt yourself that much. If it does stick, you'll have a better sense of what you want to hand over to it and why.)