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Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

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Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#231

Post by squiggleblaz »

oblio wrote: post #100
ivanbakel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am of a similar opinion, but I think it's largely due to my typical use case. If you use Nix in a "drive-by" kind of way, it's very hard to make any inroads into the language. The documentation and tutorials are not really intended for a casual user - it is expected you will sit down with the Nix site like a good book, and go at it from start to finish. If (like me) you instead touch Nix little and often, doing sma…

> If you use Nix in a "drive-by" kind of way, it's very hard to make any inroads into the language. The documentation and tutorials are not really intended for a casual user - it is expected you will sit down with the Nix site like a good book, and go at it from start to finish. If (like me) you instead touch Nix little and often, doing small invocations or on-the-fly editing, the docs are much less useful. This is s…

To agree with you:

I've used nix for a few projects over the past couple of years, always because I wouldn't have done the project without it (or I would have had to learn a series of separate solutions). I have never learnt nix, except to get it to do what I want.

When I started, it was full on "what is the magical incantation to make it do what I want?" mode. Now I am usually capable of saying "to do X I need to do Y; what is the documentation for Y?", and when I find the documentation for Y it usually conforms to my presuppositions and merely adds detail and color.

This is a really weird feeling. The idea that Nix/nixpkgs makes sense is so shocking to the core of my being. But it is still difficult even to find the documentation I want. But nix does give me another feeling that I like: confidence that I am building a system.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#232

Post by oblio »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #218
ben0x539 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used NixOS at home since like 2016. While I haven't used it professionally or for "serious" enthusiast deployments, I don't think I can claim to be a drive-by user. I still insist on using nix-env because it's what all the first-party manuals tell me to do and I don't want to get into a situation where I am experiencing huge pain and the first-party people all tell me "well, that's on you for doing things in a d…

Yeah people say the docs are unapproachable, but I agree the docs are too much "here is how to do a bunch of random things" and not enough systematically describing what Nix is . Reference first, then tutorials.

That's not how humans work.

Good tutorials first, reference second.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#233

Post by pimeys »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #35
supermatt wrote: post #9

I 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…

I agree. I’ve spent person-weeks looking into Nix, and I still can’t get it to work beyond the most basic of use cases. A few weeks ago I spent an entire weekend on the Nix discord channel trying to get help to configure VSCode for Rust development, and we collectively couldn’t figure it out. Nix is a great idea, and it’s goals are ambitious, but I haven’t found it to be usable yet. Almost any time I try to do anythi…

I did a month, diving directly into the deep end with flakes and all. I don't know, it really is hard in the beginning. Like, really hard. But eventually I got myself a setup I could use in my two laptops and workstation. A setup, that sets my home directory, all my programs and my custom desktop just the way I want. Everything is in the github repo, and installing with the flake will give me the exact experience I have in my other machines.

I tend to use lots of custom tools and commands, that are really painful to install and setup for a new machine. With NixOS all of it is just one command away.

But, I agree, it is REALLY HARD in the beginning to grasp things.

Here's my configs if you want to see how I approached my own setup: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#234

Post by root_axis »

taktoa wrote: post #207
root_axis wrote: post #42

I love nix as a concept, but in my experience it isn't practical on systems without a ton of memory. I regularly get build errors due to oom errors.

you're probably mistakenly using nix-env -i, rather than nix-env -iA

I think you're right! Thanks for this tip.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#235

Post by Izkata »

mitchmindtree wrote: post #75
jpe90 wrote: post #51

I tried Nix a few days ago. I set it up on an existing Arch install. I installed a couple of packages with "nix-env -i [package] and then tried to update them with "nix-env -u" as instructed in the official documentation: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#ch-basic-package-mgmt This ended up breaking the entire install. After a few hours of troubleshooting I found that the reason it broke was that it updated itself…

Yeah, I would really like to see `nix-env -i` recommended far less often, or at least with the caveat that this should only be for testing packages at the most. I still haven't found a good use case for it personally. One of the big wins for Nix is its declarative nature (especially for reproducibility) and installing packages in an imperative manner like this just seems to put folks back in the same position as usin…

> and installing packages in an imperative manner like this just seems to put folks back in the same position as using pacman or apt-get. Please correct me if I'm wrong Nix-ers.

It being similar to the other commands means we can use nix almost no learning curve, only having to know the equivalent commands. It's the beginner's interface, allowing you to get things done right away, and letting you postpone the complexity until you have need for the features/stability it provides.

For example, I originally started using nix because I needed a Java version not in Ubuntu's repo, and being able to say "just install it" instead of having to learn a whole new specification language is a massive benefit.

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#238

Post by nwmcsween »

Well mix was a no go for me for a few technical reasons:

* No multihost support, I want to share / between many hosts, nixos ideas support this but the implementation doesn't (and no I don't want to just share the nixstore)

* No package security, ideally package deps chains should have a per user/group created which won't allow broken programs from rm -rf / or worse.

* Nixos treats a filesystem as an object store, this goes against how most Unix tooling works (e.g how many Unix tools take a s3 obj?)

Things that might be incorrect on my part:

* No config validation, minor and hard though it would be nice if nixos had config validation.

* Single hash for store objects(?), it would be nice to use something like TLSH, etc in addition to a crypto hash

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#239

Post by MayeulC »

snicker7 wrote: post #111
MayeulC wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running it on an older laptop to try it out. `guix pull` takes so much resources, it often takes a few hours to complete, even with binary substitutes. Documentation is a bit lacking, even though it has an excellent manual. How I am supposed to specify extra command line parameters to the kernel I boot in GRUB, for instance? Or specify multiboot targets? Get a "desktop" install without GDM? In the end, I we…

> I've been running it on an older laptop to try it out. `guix pull` takes so much resources, it often takes a few hours to complete, even with binary substitutes. This is being actively worked on! https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2021/getting-bytes-to-disk-more... > I wish it didn't require root access, or allowed me to put it in an arbitrary directory I believe `guix pack -RR guix` will do package a relocatable guix fo…

Thanks for both your replies!

Looking forward to the first, and I'll look into the second. One of my goals would be so easily offload to a more powerful computer, even if it doesn't run guix.

Edit: content-addressed guix stores delivery over a content-addressed network sounds interesting, it would be even better with rolling hashes (I think ostree/casync uses those).

I dream of a yunohost-like operating system based on Guix :)

Re: Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit

#240

Post by throwaway894345 »

pimeys wrote: post #233
throwaway894345 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I’ve spent person-weeks looking into Nix, and I still can’t get it to work beyond the most basic of use cases. A few weeks ago I spent an entire weekend on the Nix discord channel trying to get help to configure VSCode for Rust development, and we collectively couldn’t figure it out. Nix is a great idea, and it’s goals are ambitious, but I haven’t found it to be usable yet. Almost any time I try to do anythi…

I did a month, diving directly into the deep end with flakes and all. I don't know, it really is hard in the beginning. Like, really hard. But eventually I got myself a setup I could use in my two laptops and workstation. A setup, that sets my home directory, all my programs and my custom desktop just the way I want. Everything is in the github repo, and installing with the flake will give me the exact experience I h…

"It's hard to grasp things" is only one part of the problem. I mentioned that there's no good way to understand nixpkgs except to manually traverse the file tree. Grokking the directory scheme will help a bit, but there's no amount of Nix Nirvana that will make it as easy as hovering over the parameter in VS Code.

In other cases, things are just broken--my nix installed rustup is failing to build packages this morning with a clang linker error (can't find iconv) and Googling the error message + 'rust' indicates that this problem is only encountered in Nix environments. Similarly, many of the other problems are that it requires you to repackage other libraries from the ground up. For example, most Python packages are available in Pypi such that users can just `pip install` them. Nixpkgs has a `pypiPackage` function that allows us to import a package from Pypi, but if that package has C dependencies (and many do, because Python's performance sucks and Python's performance sucks because everything depends on C packages precluding optimizations to the interpreter, but that's a gripe for another day) then Nix requires you to package those C dependencies in Nix first, and because every C package has its own bespoke build system with implicit dependencies, you must be expert in each individual C package in the dependency tree. Again, there's no amount of Nix Nirvana that will save you from this.

In many other cases (e.g., my 'packaging vs code with my rust plugins' example from my earlier post) we have to know the specific conventions for specific nixpkgs functions which will vary from others, and even that might not be enough. These conventions can't be derived from any general understanding or intuition of Nix (i.e., "Nix Nirvana") although it certainly doesn't hurt.

Further, NixOS is easy mode. It's the first class citizen in the Nix ecosystem. Other platforms don't work so well. In my vs code + rust plugins example, there were several posts documenting the process on NixOS, but for whatever reason Nix on other platforms (e.g., macOS) requires different configuration which is undocumented and even proficient Nix users couldn't figure out the issue.

But yeah, to your point, it is really hard to grasp as well, which exacerbates all of the above problems.

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