231–240 of 241 posts
So, looks like that being a good manager and serving it is no that easy for a good engineer in the end. (I'm not snarking at Nixpkgs core team, just at the many HN readers there that hate engineering managers in general just because they had some bad experience personally)
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Nixpkgs is one of, if not the largest, package managers by # of packages. I think naturally that will result in more abandoned packages than others. What is the % of abandoned packages relative to total I can't say. Nix tends to have updates almost as quickly as Arch does, I run a lot of bleeding edge software and have no issues, and the breadth of packages is immense. Nix just has a different style. With the AUR, yo…
> Nixpkgs is one of, if not the largest, package managers by # of packages. I'm fairly certain that the graph you're thinking of is complete bullshit. It only had approximately a third of the package count listed for a particular Ubuntu version than said version had in actuality.
Source?
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While rollback takes away some fears, “fearless” is a stretch. LLMs are relatively quite bad at Nix choosing tightly-coupled, non-modular, non-scalable patterns with unnecessary dependencies/experimental features, while also choosing to reimplement pkgs.lib functions without good reason. Generating more code, pulling in more deps to get out of the mess isn’t the solution either & is usually what I have been seeing mo…
You are most certainly correct about this! And at the same time, I kind of cherish my ignorance on the proper ways of Nix. I have so many aspects of life where I practice perfectionism, and if Nix becomes another one of them, I shall have no spare time! On the other hand, I just checked, and the domain ratemyflake.com is available. I think we should set it up, so that we can rate each other's nixings!
This is a massive part of the problem to be advocating for & adopting flakes. My config is much simpler: nixos-rebuild switch --file host/$HOSTNAME. This doesn’t require a properly evaluating, not-quite-Nix manifest file to just to build a system. If more folks understood the standard package format & overlays, they too would come to the conclusion that pointing to a file is simpler/uncoupled. packages are just derivations, as are apps, as are checks so there’s little value in separating them. Overlays, modules, configurations, these are all better as their own files too—instead of what I see more often which is coupling them to the flake so they can’t be consumed by stable nix. I have seen big corpos get totally boned by transitive dependency resolution exploding the lockfile too as input.follows does not offer the same power as overlays. The straw breaking camels’ backs to me is how restricted the input pinning options are to things being shipped by the C++ binary & the maintenance burden upstream now takes on trying to shove too many things into the binary instead of sticking to a few primitives.
You don’t need perfectionism—my config is a mess of some of my most beginner code—but the foundation folks are building on is not good & it ends up leaving very sour tastes in folks’ mouths and/or trying to build abstractions on abstractions to hide the underlying design (things built on ‘dendredic’ patterns, which itself is a questionable patterns, built on flake-parts which is questionable, all to hide limitations of flakes which is the core misstep which is hard to work with causing folks to want to overabstract).
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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.)
Containers do solve dependency hell by isolation. It's like venv/uv in Python that you switch between different environment with different sets of dependency. Or speaking essentially, you lifted yourself away from having dependencies shenanigans since you have virtualizations of it
Only if they isolate each atomic package individually. Which is exactly what Nix is and what Docker isn't.
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…
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I moved my homelab to Kubernetes. I just don’t see the use of single VPS’es. But I use the cluster as a training platform, so if I didn’t need Kubernetes in other parts of my life, I probably would have stuck with my NixOS VPS’es that all share config. I use kubenix to manage the cluster, of course. ;-)
The two aren't mutually exclusive! I just finished porting my personal kubernetes cluster from running on Debian to running on NixOS. Now whenever I want to update the host OS on my kubernetes nodes, I just build a new bootable ISO from my Nix configs and upload it to my servers, swapping out the whole OS atomically. If anything goes wrong, I can swap back to my previous build. No more anxiety running `sudo apt-get u…
But as the host OS I use Talos Linux, which itself is declarative and minimal. For small Kubernetes version upgrades, I upgrade the kubelet with an API command. When that isn't possible, I upload a new Talos image and swap them.
Since the nodes are cloud VMs, I will use a spare VM to add as a new node, and remove an old node. So I never run with fewer nodes. For my on-prem cluster, I will do the same with a spare hypervisor VM. It really helps ensure my nodes are ephemeral.
So NixOS, for now, has become a desktop/laptop operating system for me, and whenever I need an execution environment, e.g. a CI runner or a remote shell, I choose "something Nix-like" which is `nix` in a container without systemd.
I'm still a huge NixOS fan.
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> Nixpkgs is one of, if not the largest, package managers by # of packages. I'm fairly certain that the graph you're thinking of is complete bullshit. It only had approximately a third of the package count listed for a particular Ubuntu version than said version had in actuality.
> It only had approximately a third of the package count listed for a particular Ubuntu version than said version had in actuality Source?
Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?
The most obvious cause was forcing BDFL and creator Eelco to step down https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/ The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have…
>For context, Anduril is a military contractor who produce drones using machine learning on Nvidia GPUs on NixOS as well as ML based systems for detecting migrants on the US-Mexico border, cheapening state violence against migrants.
Given that ICE are currently breaking into peoples apartments and rounding people up into concentration camps, would it not be logical to conclude that the company providing software for the agency are fascists and by extension Eelco relitigating the sponsorship policy can be taken as allowing fascists in the community?
“Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.” This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years. I don’t think…
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You are most certainly correct about this! And at the same time, I kind of cherish my ignorance on the proper ways of Nix. I have so many aspects of life where I practice perfectionism, and if Nix becomes another one of them, I shall have no spare time! On the other hand, I just checked, and the domain ratemyflake.com is available. I think we should set it up, so that we can rate each other's nixings!
> tightly-coupled, non-modular, non-scalable pattern, experimental This is a massive part of the problem to be advocating for & adopting flakes. My config is much simpler: nixos-rebuild switch --file host/$HOSTNAME. This doesn’t require a properly evaluating, not-quite-Nix manifest file to just to build a system. If more folks understood the standard package format & overlays, they too would come to the conclusion th…