141–150 of 220 posts
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For a certain definition of "correctly" (namely: it doesn't, it just does what containers do and ships unique versions for every package).
Containers don't solve dependency hell. They just give you a standard way to ship your bespoke bash scripts. If you like writing bash scripts then go for it. (Personally I'd rather be doing literally anything else, like, I don't know, shoveling manure.)
All the posts about nix always go something like: 1. the "I used nix once/some time ago but I realized it's stupid/hard/whatever" 2. anime pfps/furries/trans/woke are bad 3. complaining about CoC/governance/etc Irrespective of whatever the posted article is about relating to this technology. This is one of those threads. Nix seems to have one of the worst discussion quality around here. Rust threads are similar (thou…
"If everywhere you go smells like dog poo, look at your own shoes."
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The Nixpkgs Core team was established in Sept 2025 ( https://discourse.nixos.org/t/establishing-the-nixpkgs-core-... ), so it is a fairly new concept and idea. They've accomplished some good things as highlighted in the post, but are now stepping down. Yes, we'd prefer for the team to exist, but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. It may take multiple iterations to bootstrap the concept and to figure out…
Packages were handled way before 2025 already, so it is strange that you insinuate they'd all only burn out within a year, and before that it was all cake and tea. NixOS is dying, everyone sees this right now. > but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. Then this is also a PR problem because why need a team when the 20 years before were allegedly so perfect?
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You can define an immutable, deterministic, and bootable system image for anything from an enclave to a laptop with just the primitives provided by the OCI Containerfile standard. A stagex containerfile can define a system build recipe in such a way that several competing build systems that obey the same standard can all get the same hashes, which we sign every release.
Just to confirm my understanding, is the following corrects? NixOS: “Given this configuration, build me the same system again.” StageX: “Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did.” Because aren’t these two very different things.
Ah, yearly I hate/love nix post.. I tell you what. Ever since I migrated my dev workflow to nix package manager (and home manager for system depa), my life became simpler like 10 times I can configure any macos machine in like 20 mins (I use Determinate)
For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of thi…
The Nixpkgs Core team was established in Sept 2025 ( https://discourse.nixos.org/t/establishing-the-nixpkgs-core-... ), so it is a fairly new concept and idea. They've accomplished some good things as highlighted in the post, but are now stepping down. Yes, we'd prefer for the team to exist, but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. It may take multiple iterations to bootstrap the concept and to figure out…
I'm sorry to say that this is a highly ignorant reaction to the situation. Nixpkgs was nowhere the size it is now in terms of contributors and packages, the growth in the past six years was enormous.
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I was lead on a Nix adoption effort for a few years that was kind of like that: it solved real problems, unlocked far faster, smaller, and cheaper builds than would have been possible any other way, and let us ship delta updates over crappy wifi connections to Linux computers on robots. Flakes were a perfect fit for our model, and we were just in time for stuff like up to date versions of cuda and tensorflow to be de…
My gut feeling is that Nix is just not quite the right abstraction level. I can’t quite articulate this. And hell maybe I’m wrong. I don’t want to configure a global environment. I just want a build system that works reliably in any environment and can cross-compile from any platform to any platform. Nix does too damn much. All I want is a build system that doesn’t suck. And I want to run it on windows + Mac + Linux…
The pervasive link detection structure of effectively everything on GNU/Linux assumes is (more-or-less) objectively incorrect behavior in any sane security minded context. Binaries should be able to declare the interface/contract they expect (args/types/abi/exceptions/cryptographic signatures/digests). Then the runtime linker "match" against the local system. The current system is basically 2 levels of string equality checking.
Nix goes into the right direction by getting your runtime linker/elf-runtime & package manager "integrated". But this sort of just feels like putting 'lipstick on a pig' and dancing around the core issue that `foo.exe` cannot ever realize `foobar-v1.8` and `foobar-v1.7` are both installed on the same computer. Nix just manages the environment/symlinks such that `foo.exe` doesn't realize this fact.
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This resonates with me as well. I was really into using Nix for awhile but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for a solo dev.
It gets worse when you are not a solo dev, and there's sufficient variety on people's setups. Oops, someone updated a version, and then built things for just their processor, and now I am stuck in a 20 minute compilation loop because some bad pin. Debugging Nix problems like those makes me think that old Gentoo Linux back in 2005 was easy and user friendly.
With multiple types of machines involved, you want some sort of binary cache setup, ideally automated with CI. There's niks3 [0], celler [1] (a more active fork of attic [2]), hydra [3].
0: https://github.com/Mic92/niks3
1: https://github.com/celler-cache/celler
I’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.
When I did nix, I joked that everyone I met in the community was either a queer furry kayaker or a military-industrial Terminator dev, with no in-between.