We want to make Nix better • Hacker News Board

Re: We want to make Nix better

#201

Post by theptip » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 12:36 PM UTC

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #174

theptip wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just done some prototyping with Nix, this list is spot on in enumerating the pain points I hit. I think most of the docs problems could be solved with the meta-strategy of “deeply understand all the things the Rust ecosystem got right with docs, discovery, and general pedagogical structure, and replicate that”. Actually have a canonical set of docs. Link liberally between packafes and stdlib. Figure out typing…

> I think most of the docs problems could be solved with the meta-strategy of “deeply understand all the things the Rust ecosystem got right with docs, discovery, and general pedagogical structure, and replicate that”. I think every project would love having the money to hire someone full time to work on the documentation and evangelism.

True, but the Nix project is actually investing in this area and did just hire a docs team.

Re: We want to make Nix better

#202

Post by iopq » Wed, Sep 07, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

anderspitman wrote: post #87

For the first time in about 8 years an Arch update rendered my OS unbootable last week. I'd had graphics issues once or twice but this time it just hung in systemd somewhere. Still don't know what happened. Rolled all packages back about a month and that worked, but I'll need to update eventually. I'm considering Nix but don't like the custom language. I wish Guix were. more popular and less extreme on the freedom si…

I mean, I just add packages to the list and some configuration options. If you only need it as a user it's fairly simple.

Re: We want to make Nix better

#203

Post by lykahb » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

kaba0 wrote: post #181

lykahb wrote: post #106

The name Nix is used for the language, package system, and sometimes the whole ecosystem. There is a recent post that tells the difference https://www.haskellforall.com/2022/08/stop-calling-everythin... Knowing functional programming helps but Nix still is a hard language to learn. I have a lot of Haskell experience but the Nix language was very confusing for me. At first I couldn't even tell a variable name from a k…

I believe blaming the language is misguided. The problem is that nixpkgs’ constructs are not well documented, or not yet stable. It would be a problem in any language (you can’t expect someone to feel familiar in a new codebase, and nixpkgs is essentially that).

Yeah, the conventions of nixpkgs are a much bigger obstacle than the language syntax. The language lacks static typing. Also, it is a common convention to create attribute sets crafted for logic that has indirect hard-to-follow links to module where the set is defined. This makes it hard to develop tooling like linters or LSP implementations.

Re: We want to make Nix better

#204

Post by pseudalopex » Fri, Sep 16, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

soraminazuki wrote: post #138

pseudalopex wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix isn't the only package manager for home directories or source packages. Working in a home directory doesn't require sudo or a daemon. sudo doesn't mean run everything as root.

You missed the crucial point: > So you need non-admin users to be able to use it too The build daemon and the user are used for privilege separation. The separation goes both ways. Users can't write directly to /nix/store and Nix can't write outside of /nix/store during build. If anything, it's there to make things less invasive. It's nothing like the Docker daemon, which is a proxy for root. Additionally, the daemon…

Other package managers have privilege separation without daemons. I don't need non admin users to run it. And I could configure sudo to let them if I did.