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What Is Nix?

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Re: What Is Nix?

#331

Post by foldr »

catern wrote: post #295
foldr wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there are reasons for it, but it still sucks. It ought to be possible to use binary caches and still swap out the path. (Modifying a string in an ELF executable isn't that hard.)

It's not just ELF executables that hardcode the path. There's a ton of different ways to run software which all use hardcoded paths. Which is good! That's the entire value proposition of Nix, in a way, that it's now safe to use hardcoded paths. But you can't edit all those different hardcoded paths in all those different filetypes.

Where else are paths hardcoded? This seems like a huge mess.

Re: What Is Nix?

#332

Post by floriol »

neutronicus wrote: post #282
nerdponx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd really like to see is a realistic, end-to-end tutorial for either 1) deploying a relatively straightforward web application (like Dokuwiki or ZNC), or 2) setting up a basic desktop for day-to-day use. I feel like I've seen a lot of "snippets", I feel like I understand how Nix works and what it's supposed to be good for, but I don't have a coherent sense of the steps involved in actually using it for mundane…

Yeah I was trying to do Linux things on my Chromebook and some blog or other recommended Nix as package manager. I was like cool this is like apt-get but trendy I'll try it. I then proceeded for like an hour to try and figure out how you say apt-get install in Nix. There was all this documentation but none of it said "here's how you install emacs and stop thinking about Nix"

`nix-env -iA nixos.emacs`

But I do agree with you, it's not as straight-forward as it should be yet. But I absolutely love how I can be certain that no garbage is accumulating on my computer like I needed this program one time and I don't even know what does it do, yet I have it's complete dependency graph installed that the package manager can barely uninstall. In nix I just create a `nix-shell -p package` for one time use, do my work and then forget about it. At the next `nix-collect-garbage` it will be removed from my computer completely.

Re: What Is Nix?

#333

Post by floriol »

illumin8 wrote: post #70
tel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a mess. Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system. Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system. Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It's a collection of many thousands of "derivations", many of…

I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with several projects that have been built by developers that have religion around Nix. These projects were contract work where the client paid a significant amount of money, and the final product was really poor quality. One of them is a financial application that has strict security requirements, so having a reproducible build system and some of the other qualities of Nix sound…

It sounds like "this is the first time I've seen this build system and don't really see how it works, would be better to change it to a more often used one".

Which is fair for a security auditor, but it stems from the newness of the project and nothing inherently bad with it - like I doubt they know what actually happens inside whatever other build system other's use, but since they empirically know it poses no threat they are okay with it. If you ask me, this is absolutely no reason to not use Nix - well maybe not for a bank (though on long term they would definitely win with it)

Re: What Is Nix?

#334

Post by floriol »

addicted wrote: post #128
yawaramin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like their main concern wasn't Nix but the complexity of the code itself.

The hours long build system appears to be attributed to Nix. Is Nix really that slow?

No, nix can cache already built binaries with hydra, so on a normal system it simply downloads from there - same speed as apt or the like. During the audit they likely disabled it, so nix had to build everything from scratch (like even system libraries, the build tools, everything).

Re: What Is Nix?

#335

Post by solarkraft »

tomberek wrote: post #177
rgoulter wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Same execution environment everywhere" is one way which developers use Docker. Docker gets this by copying the layers of a built image. Unlike nix, the image building itself doesn't need to be reproducible. So you can have a Dockerfile which works now but will fail to build in however many months. "Reproducible builds" do get you "same execution environment everywhere". But they have the stronger guarantee that for…

I do have to commend Docker for providing and managing an agreed upon VM for non-Linux users to host all their containers. It's the "killer-feature" that has made it as successful as it is. But underneath it requires a VM (libcontainer,LXC,virtualbox,hyperkit,etc) on non-Linux machines. This helps developers work together and quickly get small projects up and running. I'd contend that after a while, a mess of contain…

How much overlap is there between your idea and Nixery?

Re: What Is Nix?

#336

Post by bb010g »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #275
ris wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll only rebuild the packages that depended on that particular openssl. This is an area where Nix shines, because all packages are explicitly bound to their dependencies, it means it's no longer relevant what one file happens to be occupying `/usr/lib/libssl.so`, or even `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6`, so you can be running different apps that rely on totally different glibc versions alongside each other with no…

I mean if there's a bug, it's not enough to patch one particular OpenSSL. You have to audit manually, so Nix won't make much of a difference.

Except the auditing doesn't have to be manual: https://github.com/flyingcircusio/vulnix

Re: What Is Nix?

#337

Post by bb010g »

geofft wrote: post #107
mehrdadn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Your comments are always great. :) Especially this bit was I think the insight I was looking for: > This does mean that the experience of using Nix is different from using a traditional package manager - you'll need to take care of starting the services you need, etc. I was trying to figure out where exactly the trade-offs would be -- so that's one of them: it seems like (in some sense, to simplify) Nix ta…

So, there is no /nix/etc - anything in /nix is immutable. I haven't done this and hopefully someone will correct me if I get the details wrong, but I think the way you'd make this work within nix is you'd make your own package, let's call it "my-sshd-config," and it depends on a certain version of sshd. Then you'd have /nix/store/abcd1234-my-sshd-config-1.0/etc/sshd_config. (where "abcd1234" is a hash of everything i…

Have you looked into https://github.com/rycee/home-manager ?

Re: What Is Nix?

#338

Post by bb010g »

takeda wrote: post #104
dataflow wrote: post #2

I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?

Nix really is a purely functional, lazily evaluated language that is great at expressing dependencies in your project. You can think of it as a make on steroids, but it is much more than that. Because the language expresses what to build from a known state (i.e. nothing is installed) together with its purely functional properties, means that for the same input (source code, dependencies, configuration options, system…

home-manager is wonderful. I haven't used nix-env in years.

Re: What Is Nix?

#339

Post by bb010g »

mossity wrote: post #61
dataflow wrote: post #2

I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?

I started reading this thinking Nix was a programming language, became very confused when it started talking about files and an object database.

Smalltalk has object databases, as images.

Re: What Is Nix?

#340

Post by bb010g »

rixed wrote: post #208
magnusmorton wrote: post #88

I feel someone should say something about guix here. I don’t have anything worth saying about either though

Anecdote about the subjective difference between using both: I've used nix and nixos on and off since the early versions, but it never really clicked with me, and every time I want to write or just read nix expressions I have to reread lots of documentation like I'm starting from scratch again, whereas I would probably still be able to write a debian package from memory alone despite many years of lack of practice. T…

I'd say the PR quite is less bureaucracy and more a high number of packages with not enough hands to process them all.
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