The merges-straight-to-master give me the willies.
Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
11–20 of 243 posts
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#12I spend a few hours looking at nix about a year ago and found it impenetrable. I simply do not grok the syntax or what the functions do. I tried searching for the functions shown in the examples on the website to no avail. I searched packages, options, and even resorted to ctrl-f while clicking through the site "documentation"... It sounds awesome, but its in dire need of some better documentation if it wants to be a…
Did you follow the language tutorial in the manual or something else?
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#13The merges-straight-to-master give me the willies. https://botsin.space/@complainingaboutmastercommits
We've grown a lot in last few years and haven't caught up with the policies. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/118661 for details.
Note that those statistics are incorrect, but pushes to master still do happen.
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#14I spend a few hours looking at nix about a year ago and found it impenetrable. I simply do not grok the syntax or what the functions do. I tried searching for the functions shown in the examples on the website to no avail. I searched packages, options, and even resorted to ctrl-f while clicking through the site "documentation"... It sounds awesome, but its in dire need of some better documentation if it wants to be a…
Did you follow the language tutorial in the manual or something else?
I would have followed the official manual. I see that you are putting together some tutorials, so I will definitely check those out.
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#15Nice, but this is as far from devops as knitting. They covered CI, but there is CD, all the cloud stuff, containers, security and so on.
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#16I don't see how they've proven their extra levels of abstraction to be solving more problems than they will add. Focus on the basics. We can do everything with containers, basic init systems (without sytemD), snapshots, simplifying build systems, removing layers of abstraction, swarm mode, and a bit of custom glue & thinking...
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#17The gotcha I have with Nix is it's too much abstraction. I have to look at the upstream documentation, then try and map it to Nix's config syntax, then hope everything works.
Also, regarding DevOps, the tooling around Nix makes it a little brittle for anything event based--rapidly changing configurations on the fly due to network conditions (Consul, Ansible, etc). This is where configuration management is heading, and due to the static nature of Nix, delegating dynamic changes is hard/anti pattern.
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#18When those DevOps happen to work with GNU/Linux only.
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#19Obligatory link to its cousin: https://guix.gnu.org/ A package manager or a full distro. I use the package manager on top of Debian, it's great, it allows me to get recent package versions the most straightforward way (like the latest Emacs), in exchange of disk space (easily some GB before a `guix gc` cleanup).
Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
#20I tried to learn before. But the docs made it incredibly hard. They went into excruciating detail of how it works. I still never made my own nix package. I’m wondering as a solo dev, who uses his personal machine, and two servers, if the hard work of learning it will pay off. But it definitely looks interesting.
What kind of tutorial would you like to read?
Something more like “And now you can do this” rather than “And now you know how it works “.
The docs for using nix as a package manager are decent. But the rest, less so. They’re a recursive rabbit hole of confusion.