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Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

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Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#61

Post by Filligree »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #59
raffraffraff wrote: post #42

Reading the comments makes me think I'm turning into my dad. He was a simple man in terms of education and career. He was a fire man on a stream train in 1950, a farmer, barman, handyman. Out in the sticks, he was everyone's go-to guy when a vet couldn't be found, because he kept a "livestock first aid kit" including penicillin & syringes. He talked to vets and read books and knew about the most common ailments and h…

Here's what's been key for me: Absolutely separate -- in your mind -- NixOS from Nix. The latter I've seen be a very useful tool that does what people here talk about: cleans up dependency and build and installation management in a reasonably nice way. The former is a religion/world-view that requires a complete mindset change, accepting a whole dogma, and differs entirely from how you're used to using Linux. I gave…

> Where it falls down is like anything else like this: it basically requires that all the things you dep on also adhere to this philosophy and have nix setups already or you'll be in a world of pain rolling your own. I gave up on converting our $work stuff when it became clear that the versions of flatbuffers and a few other deps we depend on just weren't out there in the nix ecosystem and I wasn't going to volunteer to make them.

Maybe I'm a bad NixOS user, but I tend to run most of my development work through steam-run, unless the necessary default.nix is really simple. It works fine, and having the rest of the system be immutable is still an advantage.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#62

Post by Filligree »

tombert wrote: post #21
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>`nix build` command disables network access Only if building with sandbox enabled. Can disable it if network access is required. Seems someone opened an issue asking[1] for granular permissions (explicit network restriction) but has been marked as stale. In same issue someone else has made comment providing an hybrid approach. Since you mentioned Julia, it's possible to build Julia environments (with arbitrary packa…

I didn’t realize that. I will give that a look.

Instead of disabling it completely, you can set it to 'relaxed'. That still allows network access, but maintains the other isolation guarantees.

Obviously this introduces a potential impurity. I use it for installing NeoForge into a minecraft server derivation; the downloaded files could change behind my back, but so long as the version doesn't change it should still be compatible. It hasn't yet caused trouble.

NixOS has a lot of escape hatches once you look around, and you shouldn't be afraid to use them. The downside of impure derivations aren't quite as bad as not-using-derivations, anyway.

Another option is to declare it as a fixed-output derivation, in which case network access is enabled by default. This doesn't work for most installers, though; at a minimum you'll need to delete logfiles that might contain timestamps.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#63

Post by mtndew4brkfst »

charlotte-fyi wrote: post #26
andrewla wrote: post #7

I'm very excited by all the attempts to replace Nix, but I don't think I'll be exploring this much deeper. In my opinion the issue with Nix is that the data model is not crisply defined -- it's there, but hidden under a lot of goop that is the Nix language itself and the various assumptions and baggage that goes with it. What I want is a primarily declarative syntax supporting a rich set of data structures, ideally a…

I think that declarative configuration languages scratch the itch of a lot of developer brains, but in practice it doesn’t really matter and using more familiar languages is a huge benefit to devex that shouldn’t be overlooked if the goal is to be mainstream. Yes, it requires more discipline on the reviewer front not to create abstractions that are too powerful/footgun-y, but it’s totally possible to write clear, dec…

This is pretty much the same stance many people hold about Pulumi and I never found it compelling there either. In that product's case, the core languages for writing expressions are the languages that IMO have some of the most dysfunctional dependency-management stories in industry (Python, Node/JS/TS, Golang).

Since part of the sales pitch of using a general lang is emphasis on code reuse, it rings kind of hollow for me there, and here too.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#64

Post by n8henrie »

whateveracct wrote: post #34
charlotte-fyi wrote: post #5

Very exciting. The ideas behind Nix are so good and everything else so bad. It seems like a lot of people are trying to solve this by building abstractions on top of Nix, but I'm really skeptical that is the solution. As crazy as a full rewrite is, I hope someone succeeds!

ever use nix repl? i found my complaints about grokkability disappeared once i realized i could easily introspect my build (and all my dependencies' builds) at any level. that + learning the like 5 or so idioms that pervade nixpkgs and you can use Nix quite successfully imo.

Could you share an example of how you use nix repl? I use it every once in a while, but usually I'm starting from scratch and trying to replicate an error for debugging. It almost sounds like you're using the `--debugger` option (isn't there something like that?) which I've not had much luck with.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#65

Post by barfbagginus »

raffraffraff wrote: post #42

Reading the comments makes me think I'm turning into my dad. He was a simple man in terms of education and career. He was a fire man on a stream train in 1950, a farmer, barman, handyman. Out in the sticks, he was everyone's go-to guy when a vet couldn't be found, because he kept a "livestock first aid kit" including penicillin & syringes. He talked to vets and read books and knew about the most common ailments and h…

Be like your father except with knowledge of Category Theory

That's the best we can do.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#66

Post by stackskipton »

taink wrote: post #57
raffraffraff wrote: post #42

Reading the comments makes me think I'm turning into my dad. He was a simple man in terms of education and career. He was a fire man on a stream train in 1950, a farmer, barman, handyman. Out in the sticks, he was everyone's go-to guy when a vet couldn't be found, because he kept a "livestock first aid kit" including penicillin & syringes. He talked to vets and read books and knew about the most common ailments and h…

Reminds me of this quote from Douglas Adams: I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invent…

As I've hit age defined in 3, some of it is also "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is mostly same stuff you had before but upgraded. You are confused why everyone is losing their minds over it."

It reminds me of current AI craze. We had a bit of this in 2016, it didn't go well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#67

Post by AJRF »

raffraffraff wrote: post #42

Reading the comments makes me think I'm turning into my dad. He was a simple man in terms of education and career. He was a fire man on a stream train in 1950, a farmer, barman, handyman. Out in the sticks, he was everyone's go-to guy when a vet couldn't be found, because he kept a "livestock first aid kit" including penicillin & syringes. He talked to vets and read books and knew about the most common ailments and h…

I think I am similar to you - hate complexity, hate shiny things - but, I love Nix because it solves a real problem. That problem being deterministic builds.

It is a common and real problem that builds with "state" cause problems very often for people not even doing complex things.

I think Nix is complex, but because it solves a real, common issue I grin and bear it.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#68

Post by falcor84 »

stackskipton wrote: post #66
taink wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of this quote from Douglas Adams: I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invent…

As I've hit age defined in 3, some of it is also "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is mostly same stuff you had before but upgraded. You are confused why everyone is losing their minds over it." It reminds me of current AI craze. We had a bit of this in 2016, it didn't go well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

>mostly same stuff you had before but upgraded. You are confused why everyone is losing their minds over it

That's a good way of thinking about this. [Showing my age here], I remember being unfazed about the web in the mid 90s, thinking to myself "I already have Encarta which does hypertext with multimedia so well, why do I need this new thing populated by random people".

But of course the web did have a lot to offer. I suppose I keep coming back to "Quantity has a quality all its own" - sometimes even a relatively small upgrade makes an existing solution suddenly accessible to more people and a viable solution to more problems.

Re: Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

#70

Post by [deleted] »

raffraffraff wrote: post #42

Reading the comments makes me think I'm turning into my dad. He was a simple man in terms of education and career. He was a fire man on a stream train in 1950, a farmer, barman, handyman. Out in the sticks, he was everyone's go-to guy when a vet couldn't be found, because he kept a "livestock first aid kit" including penicillin & syringes. He talked to vets and read books and knew about the most common ailments and h…

[deleted]
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