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Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

geospatial-nix.today

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Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#11

Post by imincik »

afatparakeet wrote: post #8

This is awesome. Such a great use case for nix. I do a lot of geospatial processing in the cloud and I've been using Tippecanoe a lot to create vector tiles. It pairs well with PM Tiles for storing on the cloud. It seriously increases the web app performance for massive data sets. I queue these up with ECS tasks to process our json/csv/parquet input and create optimize vector tile outputs. https://github.com/felt/tip…

Thank you. tippecanoe is provided by nixpkgs and you can search for it in "PACKAGES" tab in geospatial-nix.today.

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#12

Post by afatparakeet »

imincik wrote: post #11
afatparakeet wrote: post #8

This is awesome. Such a great use case for nix. I do a lot of geospatial processing in the cloud and I've been using Tippecanoe a lot to create vector tiles. It pairs well with PM Tiles for storing on the cloud. It seriously increases the web app performance for massive data sets. I queue these up with ECS tasks to process our json/csv/parquet input and create optimize vector tile outputs. https://github.com/felt/tip…

Thank you. tippecanoe is provided by nixpkgs and you can search for it in "PACKAGES" tab in geospatial-nix.today.

Oh awesome! Thanks for the tip!

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#13

Post by null_point »

> In a world of horrendously complex software developed by myriads of authors, be smart, use Nix

I mean, Nix is pretty complex software, and is an added layer of abstraction in many contexts. Framing Nix as a solution to complexity seems to be a tenuous claim.

What Nix can help with, imo, is reducing toil. And a good abstraction maintained by a team can reduce toil for a lot of others.

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#14

Post by horaborza »

detourdog wrote: post #6
freemanon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it exactly that you're trying to solve? Are you creating a UI for setting up nix flake configs? What does it do beyond that? And why is it coupled to geospatial tools?

I understood that the either the origin of the effort was based on geospatial tool management or geospatial tools are hairy enough problem to prove the value of the product.

This is correct, to the best of my knowledge. Unfortunately certain entities in the space do not make a great effort to avoid breaking changes.

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#15

Post by ris »

null_point wrote: post #13

> In a world of horrendously complex software developed by myriads of authors, be smart, use Nix I mean, Nix is pretty complex software, and is an added layer of abstraction in many contexts. Framing Nix as a solution to complexity seems to be a tenuous claim. What Nix can help with, imo, is reducing toil. And a good abstraction maintained by a team can reduce toil for a lot of others.

> Framing Nix as a solution to complexity seems to be a tenuous claim.

Disagree strongly. Building a large and varied set of software packages in a generalised and reproducible way is a fundamentally complex endeavour, and nixpkgs is the most successful effort I've encountered to simplify it.

In contrast, build & packaging systems that try to present apparent "simplicity" are usually ignoring a lot of the subtle difficulties in building software in a reproducible and robust manner, leading to extended and vague debugging sessions. See for instance almost any non-trivial Dockerfile-based build procedure.

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#17

Post by imincik »

markstos wrote: post #16

I used Conda to install QGIS and a compatible set of plugins. But that’s python-specific and this works for packages in other languages, so I’ve bookmarked it.

Thanks, in many regards, Nix is already much better than Conda/Homebrew/Flatpak ... and we (the Nix community) are working very hard to improve the remaining weaknesses.

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#18

Post by null_point »

ris wrote: post #15
null_point wrote: post #13

> In a world of horrendously complex software developed by myriads of authors, be smart, use Nix I mean, Nix is pretty complex software, and is an added layer of abstraction in many contexts. Framing Nix as a solution to complexity seems to be a tenuous claim. What Nix can help with, imo, is reducing toil. And a good abstraction maintained by a team can reduce toil for a lot of others.

> Framing Nix as a solution to complexity seems to be a tenuous claim. Disagree strongly. Building a large and varied set of software packages in a generalised and reproducible way is a fundamentally complex endeavour, and nixpkgs is the most successful effort I've encountered to simplify it. In contrast, build & packaging systems that try to present apparent "simplicity" are usually ignoring a lot of the subtle diff…

I use Nix every day. I love it, but I'd be lying if I claimed it things less complex. I don't think that is very controversial. To build software using Nix you still need to understand how that software builds without Nix plus you need to know some amount of Nix. If the abstraction was airtight, then I'd agree, but currently, it is a very leaky abstraction. But that doesn't mean it's bad, just a trade-off to consider.

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#19

Post by pella »

Interesting and useful work, keep it up.

However, I took a look at a few geospatial-nix packages:

- https://github.com/imincik/geospatial-nix/blob/master/pkgs/p...

- https://github.com/imincik/geospatial-nix/blob/master/pkgs/g...

But it seems like the packages are minimally tested.

Am I seeing this correctly?

For example, with postgis, I miss the 'make check';

"The above command will run through various checks and regression tests using the generated library against an actual PostgreSQL database."

https://postgis.net/docs/postgis_installation.html#idm738

Re: Geospatial Nix – create, use and deploy today

#20

Post by febed »

imincik wrote: post #9

The quick answer of the question "Why this project makes a sense ?" is following: Nix is solving the principal problems of software building, distribution, deployment, configuration, supply chain security and many others in very elegant but unique way. It also comes with plenty of other unique features which doesn't exist anywhere else. The cost of this is quite steep learning and adoption curve. geospatial-nix.today…

Nice work! I’m new to Nix -would this tool help me build for e.g. customized GDAL deb/rpm for a specific version of Ubuntu or Centos?
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