Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Is Nix?

engineering.shopify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 344 posts

Re: What Is Nix?

#51

Post by catern »

dataflow wrote: post #46
catern wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to put it politely, but your question seems a bit confused. Arch is not the only distro that strives for minimal modifications on upstream packages. In fact, most distributions work that way - it's Debian and its derivatives that's the outlier, and these days, even Debian rarely patches upstream packages. There is much more to distributions than what patches they apply to their packages. The package manger the…

Thanks for explaining. I'm (obviously, I thought) not suggesting distros are only about the patches, but patches are a very significant aspect of their raisons d'être to me. I thought most distro maintainers do things like backporting changes though, for security/stability/etc.? Including RedHat, Canonical, the Debian maintainers, etc.? Arch (and I guess Gentoo, and maybe their derivatives like Manjaro) are the only…

Fedora stays close to upstream: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Staying_close_to_upstream_pro...

Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, they patch things heavily, just like Debian.

SUSE, I don't know about their policy. I assume they're like RHEL, which starts from Fedora, which is close to upstream, and then backports bugfixes from later versions on to stable branches.

Many distros maintain stable branches and just update the packages on that branch when they have security issues. Backporting security fixes has (somewhat) gone out of favor, because backports executed by package maintainers that weren't familiar with the code have caused serious security issues in the past. Of course, distros like RHEL and (I guess) SUSE still do backport security fixes to their stable branches. But they start from a base which is close to upstream - it just diverges more and more as their stable branch gets older and older.

Re: What Is Nix?

#52

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

leadingthenet wrote: post #4
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?

It’s a package manager that underlies NixOS. It can also be run under any other Linux distro, and macOS.

And of course Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: What Is Nix?

#53

Post by smabie »

I have always wanted to try Nix, but not sure how installing software from source outside the package system works. With Arch Linux, it's pretty easy to create an AUR package if it doesn't exist, or simply install it outside the package system. Is it easy to create Nix packages (based on the features of Nix, I'm guessing no)? What about if you don't feel like creating a package?

Re: What Is Nix?

#54

Post by burke »

smabie wrote: post #53

I have always wanted to try Nix, but not sure how installing software from source outside the package system works. With Arch Linux, it's pretty easy to create an AUR package if it doesn't exist, or simply install it outside the package system. Is it easy to create Nix packages (based on the features of Nix, I'm guessing no)? What about if you don't feel like creating a package?

I think it's about as easy as creating AUR packages most of the time, especially after the first one or two. You can create them in a more ad-hoc way than you probably expect. For example, this video shows an example of creating a totally-legitimately-real package: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nU_hR2kod4 -- some of the follow-ups in the channel also show a little more work with that simple derivation ("package" in de-nixified terms)

Re: What Is Nix?

#55

Post by abathur »

smabie wrote: post #53

I have always wanted to try Nix, but not sure how installing software from source outside the package system works. With Arch Linux, it's pretty easy to create an AUR package if it doesn't exist, or simply install it outside the package system. Is it easy to create Nix packages (based on the features of Nix, I'm guessing no)? What about if you don't feel like creating a package?

You can use Nix on your existing OS with no obligation to install all packages with it. On macOS, I use Nix for most things, but I still use homebrew for a few things and occasionally download+install.

Re: What Is Nix?

#56

Post by burke »

lmickh wrote: post #31
siscia wrote: post #23

Really looking forward for knowing how Shopify use nix and what problem the find with it. I was advocating for it in my organisation but eventually we decided for a different technologies...

Burke Libbey has a few talks that are available on YouTube including a presentation at NixCon about the work he is doing at Shopify. I would highly recommend checking them out if you are interested in Nix.

Hi! Yes, and here's the link to my recent Nixology playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRGI9KQ3_HP_OFRG6R-p4...

Re: What Is Nix?

#57

Post by gnulinux »

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?

> 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?

That's exactly the case. It works by installing apps per user and not globally, so they're put into your home directory.

Re: What Is Nix?

#58

Post by roblabla »

smabie wrote: post #53

I have always wanted to try Nix, but not sure how installing software from source outside the package system works. With Arch Linux, it's pretty easy to create an AUR package if it doesn't exist, or simply install it outside the package system. Is it easy to create Nix packages (based on the features of Nix, I'm guessing no)? What about if you don't feel like creating a package?

Creating nix packages is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Maybe a tiny bit more involved than AUR packages since it's a new language and all, but it's not that much more difficult. When I was using nixos on my desktop machine, I made packages for my own personal tools, so it integrated in the system.

It's also very easy to customize a package to suit your needs, and in fact makes for a very nice system to hack on open source projects. You can mostly setup an override in your $HOME to make a package's source come from your local disk, and when you install the package it will compile locally instead of getting a prebuilt binary.

If you don't go through their packaging system... It's really easy to end up in a mess. There are ways to simulate a "normal" linux from within nixos, essentially making a chroot in which the various libraries are in their normal locations (achieved through an overlay filesystem). I believe that's what they do to run the Steam client. I assume (though never tried) you could use this to run other binaries without packaging. But then... what's the point?

Re: What Is Nix?

#59

Post by eloff »

tel wrote: post #20
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?

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…

This comment was better than the article at explaining what is nix, thanks!

Re: What Is Nix?

#60

Post by thequux »

mehrdadn wrote: post #36
catern wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix packages are typically close to upstream, but low-level packages sometimes have patches to make them more reproducible and deterministic, so that they work better with Nix's efforts for determinism and purely-functional packaging. Nix packages are created from scratch, not copied from another distro. Nix is typically one of the most up-to-date distros: https://repology.org/

Okay thanks, so it sounds like I'll (roughly) end up with Arch (i.e. mostly-unmodified) whether I start on Ubuntu, Fedora, or whatever. I have another on that front: what about things like kernels? Don't those conflict with the OS?

If you install the "linux" package using nix on Debian, you get a directory in your nix store (the collection of "installed" packages) containing a bzImage, a System.map, and a `lib` directory containing all of the kernel modules. It would then be up to you to build an initrd and wire it into your bootloader, if that's what you wanted to do.

In other words, Nix packages are just files in their own special place on the disk (under /nix). If you want to configure binaries from those packages to run as daemons, or otherwise be wired into the system globally, that's up to you.

In fact, this is also true for the packages that you've "installed"! The nix package manager creates a package that represents your "user environment", and that package just merges all of the packages you installed using symlinks, and a symlink to that package is added to your $PATH.

Post reply on HN