Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

what word would you fit to what a nix derivation is?

“Build plan” would maybe be a more obvious name, but it’d still be confusing to deviate from what Nox uses, IMO.

I'm not sure, I'm not a Nix expert. The comments here also refer to it as both instructions to build something, as well as the intermediate build artifact. This discussion[1] on the NixOS forums explains it as a "blueprint" or "recipe". So there's clearly a lot of confusion about what it is, yet everyone understands "blueprint", "recipe", or even "intermediate build artifact" if you want to be technical.

The same is true for "flakes". It's a uniquely Nix term with no previous technical usage AFAIK.

Ideally you want to avoid using specialized terms if possible. But if you do decide to do that, then your documentation needs to be very clear and precise, which is another thing that Nix(OS) spectacularly fumbles. Take this page[2] that's supposed to explain derivations, for example. The first sentence has a circular reference to the term, only mentioning in parenthesis that it's a "build task". So why not call it that? And why not start with the definition first, before bringing up technical terms like functions and attributes? There are examples like this in many places, even without general problems of it being outdated or incomplete.

Though I don't think going the other way and overloading general terms is a good idea either. For example, Homebrew likes to use terms like "tap" and "bottle" to describe technical concepts, which has the similar effect of having to explain what the thing actually is.

Docker is a good example of getting this right: containers, images, layers, build stages, intermediate images, etc. It uses already familiar technical terms and adopts them where they make most sense. When you additionally have excellent documentation, all these things come together for a good user experience, and become essential to a widespread adoption of the tool.

[1]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-a-derivation/28311/6

[2]: https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.18/language/derivations

https://github.com/256lights/zb/blob/102795d6cb383a919dd378d...

TIL I can also use semicolons on lua tables, not just commas:

  return derivation {
    name = "hello.txt";
    ["in"] = path "hello.txt";
    builder = "/bin/sh";
    system = "x86_64-linux";
    args = {"-c", "while read line; do echo \"$line\"; done  $out"};
  }

I like using lua as a DSL, now I like it even more! I've using lua as a html templating language that looks like this:

  DIV {
   id="id";
   class="class;
   H1 "heading";
   P [[
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, 
    sed do eiusmod tempor ]] / EM incididunt / [[ ut labore et 
    dolore magna aliqua.
   ]];
   PRE ^ CODE [[ this is  tag inside 
 ]];
  }