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Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

zombiezen.com

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Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#61

Post by hinkley »

photonthug wrote: post #56
skybrian wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I like to see is a 'dry run' like 'make -n'. Although, maybe that's not possible in all cases. Another possibility might be to output a something like a shell script that would do a rebuild the same way, so you can see what it did and hack it when debugging.

Yes. Dry runs at least, and better yet terraform-style planning that produces an artifact that can be applied. These should really be more common with all kinds of software

I would like to see more tools iterate on trying to do terraform-like output because while terraform diffs are interesting, practically most of my teammates couldn’t tell what the fuck they said and a couple times I missed important lines that caused us prod issues. I think we can do a better job than showing a wall of text.

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#64

Post by zombiezen »

kortex wrote: post #58
zombiezen wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I think I need to add something to the README. I've been pronouncing it as "zeeb" in my head as in the first syllable Zebesian Space Pirate from Metroid, but TIL that that's canonically "Zay-bay-zee-uhn" so idk. Naming is hard.

I kinda dig zeeb! Naming is hard. Really awesome project by the way! Should have mentioned that first. Build systems are neat. I've always wanted to try building a build system, in a "learn how it works" sense, not so much "yet another build tool".

Thanks! And go for it, it's a good learning experience! It's a really interesting problem domain and there's a lot of different directions you can take it.

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#65

Post by photonthug »

hinkley wrote: post #61
photonthug wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Dry runs at least, and better yet terraform-style planning that produces an artifact that can be applied. These should really be more common with all kinds of software

I would like to see more tools iterate on trying to do terraform-like output because while terraform diffs are interesting, practically most of my teammates couldn’t tell what the fuck they said and a couple times I missed important lines that caused us prod issues. I think we can do a better job than showing a wall of text.

Presentation is a separate matter though, just like with git diffs ideally you could choose a wall of text or a side by side ui, see things at a high level or drill down to line by line. A tag layer plus custom validation between plan/apply gives you an automatic way to short circuit things. But none of it can work without a plan as a first class object.

Thing is the plan/apply split isn’t even primarily for users necessarily, it’s just good design. It makes testing easier, and leaves open the possibility for plugging in totally different resolution strategies without rewriting the whole core. The benefits are so big there that I’d strongly prefer that more software is using it more often, even if I’m going to shut my eyes and auto apply every time without glancing at the plan.

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#66

Post by sweeter »

imiric wrote: post #13

Happy to see someone inspired by Nix, but wanting to carve their own path. Nix popularized some powerful ideas in the Linux world, but it has a steep learning curve and a very unfriendly UI, so there is plenty of room for improvement there. I'm not sure if Lua is the right choice, though. A declarative language seems like a better fit for reproducibility. The goal of supporting non-deterministic builds also seems to…

I thought of creating something similar and I was going to use a personal fork of the Go compiler with some mods, anko (which is a really cool go binding language) or righting my own DSL. It's quite the undertaking.

I like Nix and NixOS a lot, its really cool, but it has some really odd management issues and the language IMO is horrendous. I used NixOS for around a year and I was changing my Nixpkgs version and I got that same generic nonsense error that doesn't have any semantic meaning and I was just over it. I'm not too fond of commenting out random parts of code to figure out where something minor and obscure failed. Sometimes it tells you the module it had a problem with, or will point out an out of place comma, and other times its just like "idk bruh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "failed at builtin 'seq'" is the best I can do"

the paradigm is a million dollar idea though. I have no doubt its the future of a large portion of the future, both for programming and generic systems. I just wish it wasn't a pain to write and it had some sensible error handling.

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#67

Post by kstenerud »

School-Cotton wrote: post #54
pdimitar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surface-level feedback: get rid of the word "derivation". Surely there must be a better way to describe the underlying thing...

What’s wrong with it? It’s a term of art that means a specific thing in both nix and guix; it’d just be confusing if zb renamed it to something else.

I'm 80% finished moving all of my servers from NixOS to Debian. I used NixOS for 3 years (even wrote some custom flakes) before finally giving up (for the final year I was just too scared to touch it, and then said "I shouldn't be scared of my OS"). I should know what "derivation" means, but I can't for the life of me remember...

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#68

Post by smilliken »

kstenerud wrote: post #67
School-Cotton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with it? It’s a term of art that means a specific thing in both nix and guix; it’d just be confusing if zb renamed it to something else.

I'm 80% finished moving all of my servers from NixOS to Debian. I used NixOS for 3 years (even wrote some custom flakes) before finally giving up (for the final year I was just too scared to touch it, and then said "I shouldn't be scared of my OS"). I should know what "derivation" means, but I can't for the life of me remember...

"Derivation" refers to the nix intermediate build artifact, a .drv file, which contains the instructions to perform the build itself. Basically a nix program compiles to a derivation file which gets run to produce the build outputs. The hash in the /nix/store for a dependency is the hash of the derivation. Conveniently if the hash is already in a build cache, you can download the cached build outputs instead of building it yourself.

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#69

Post by kstenerud »

smilliken wrote: post #68
kstenerud wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 80% finished moving all of my servers from NixOS to Debian. I used NixOS for 3 years (even wrote some custom flakes) before finally giving up (for the final year I was just too scared to touch it, and then said "I shouldn't be scared of my OS"). I should know what "derivation" means, but I can't for the life of me remember...

"Derivation" refers to the nix intermediate build artifact, a .drv file, which contains the instructions to perform the build itself. Basically a nix program compiles to a derivation file which gets run to produce the build outputs. The hash in the /nix/store for a dependency is the hash of the derivation. Conveniently if the hash is already in a build cache, you can download the cached build outputs instead of build…

Ah OK, then I'd actually never actually understood what a derivation is. But then again, the name "derivation" doesn't at all lead to guessing at such a definition, either.

Re: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

#70

Post by Modified3019 »

kstenerud wrote: post #67
School-Cotton wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with it? It’s a term of art that means a specific thing in both nix and guix; it’d just be confusing if zb renamed it to something else.

I'm 80% finished moving all of my servers from NixOS to Debian. I used NixOS for 3 years (even wrote some custom flakes) before finally giving up (for the final year I was just too scared to touch it, and then said "I shouldn't be scared of my OS"). I should know what "derivation" means, but I can't for the life of me remember...

Yeah I ended up with the same issue. While I’m technically inclined, I’m not nearly to the point where I can handle the fire hose of (badly named) abstraction at all levels like some people.

I could never have pulled off what this guy did https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2021/03/07/qubes-lite-with-kv..., though ironically his journal is probably one of the best “how nix actually works” tutorials I’ve ever seen, even though it isn’t intended for that or complete for such a purpose. He’s the only reason I know that a derivation is basically an intermediate build object.

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