7 ms·

Excellent! Really, anything to propel Nix(OS) or Guix(SD) forward gets a huge thumbs up in my book. Nix is one of those things that I explain and then have peop

Excellent! Really, anything to propel Nix(OS) or Guix(SD) forward gets a huge thumbs up in my book. Nix is one of those things that I explain and then have people telling me I'm wrong and/or an idiot because they can't believe that you can have a distribution based on building packages from source, backed by a binary cache. If you think Snappy or Flatpak/Xdg-App are cool, you owe it to yourself to look at Nix/Guix, which provide a superset of the features provided by Snappy. And then some. NixOS + NixOps means I can have a single declarative file that describes the state of my cloud VMs, cloud load balancer, cloud Traffic Manager... plus the exact software on the VMs (all the way down to the exact checkout of gcc used to compile everything and the nginx configurations)... literally everything is snapshotted and revertable. If it weren't for a systemd-related bug, I'd have a one-command way of getting a Kubernetes cluster booted in Azure via NixOS, where upgrading a cluster would simply require editting a single file and re-running the nixops tool. I wish more people knew about NixOS. You know how everyone writes pie-in-the-sky blogposts about the "next-gen" Node.JS package manager? Yeah, well, Nix already packages NodeJS libraries/apps, plus Rust libraries/apps, plus Go libraries/apps, plus Python libraries/apps, etc, etc.

bojo 10y ago
> If it weren't for a systemd-related bug, I'd have a one-command way of getting a Kubernetes cluster booted Damn, could you explain what this is specifically? Running a Kubernetes cluster on NixOS was next on my list of architectures to test.
- colemickens 10y ago
  The networking related services (Flannel) weren't waiting for the network to be available - I think I needed to configure one of the meta units that is meant to help block until network is ready. Now that there is Azure cloudprovider support in Kubernetes, there's no need for Flannel, so it's possible that this could be made to work... I ditched NixOS ~4 months ago; I think I had some patches on top of nixpkgs for updating Kube/flannel/etc, and then I have a branch of `nixops` that has the Kubernetes example. Might be a fun project to pick back up some weekend... I had a whole bunch of commits on top of nixpkgs, updating Flannel/Kubernetes and fixing up the Kubernetes module: https://github.com/colemickens/nixpkgs/commits/cmpkgs https://github.com/colemickens/nixpkgs/commits/cmpkgs And then on nixops, a branch that adds in the Kubernetes example. Keep in mind that it doesn't quite work right, and things are possibly broken since my nixpkgs fork is so stale at this point. https://github.com/colemickens/nixops/commit/9e97fd4166e7062ddc510cd36b16228d112c815d https://github.com/colemickens/nixops/commit/9e97fd4166e7062...
aidenn0 10y ago
"If it weren't for a systemd-related bug..." I've started so many sentences with those exact words, and it kind of saddens me. I'm still hoping that the problems with systemd aren't fundamental to its architecture, and it just needs some more polishing. It certainly is incredibly ambitious as it aims to replace on the order of a dozen different pieces of software, so some hiccups are to be expected.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Nah, its the mentality within the project. One that i think can be summed up as "code, compile, push, repeat". More and more it seems that the incoming generation treats everything like a web site that they can change at whim. Likely because they have had the internet and source repositories the whole time, and thus do not know the value of a truly stable and maintained system.
boothead 10y ago
I'd very much like to hear about using NixOS to provision kubernetes or mesos too.
- colemickens 10y ago
  I added some info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388571
cstrahan 10y ago
> Nix is one of those things that I explain and then have people telling me I'm wrong and/or an idiot because they can't believe that you can have a distribution based on building packages from source, backed by a binary cache. Hehe, same here. The number of times I'e had people tell me "uh, no, your package-manager/OS can't do that because <reasons that assume FHS dumping ground of libs/headers and global, mutable config state>" -- too many to count :). I'm still trying to find a 30 second sales pitch that manages to get through people's preconceived notions. If I can get someone to look over my shoulder at my terminal for about 5 minutes, that usually blows them away, but that's not always an option (like here in the comments section, vs coworkers at the office).

bojo 10y ago

> If it weren't for a systemd-related bug, I'd have a one-command way of getting a Kubernetes cluster booted Damn, could you explain what this is specifically? Running a Kubernetes cluster on NixOS was next on my list of architectures to test.

colemickens 10y ago
The networking related services (Flannel) weren't waiting for the network to be available - I think I needed to configure one of the meta units that is meant to help block until network is ready. Now that there is Azure cloudprovider support in Kubernetes, there's no need for Flannel, so it's possible that this could be made to work... I ditched NixOS ~4 months ago; I think I had some patches on top of nixpkgs for updating Kube/flannel/etc, and then I have a branch of `nixops` that has the Kubernetes example. Might be a fun project to pick back up some weekend... I had a whole bunch of commits on top of nixpkgs, updating Flannel/Kubernetes and fixing up the Kubernetes module: https://github.com/colemickens/nixpkgs/commits/cmpkgs https://github.com/colemickens/nixpkgs/commits/cmpkgs And then on nixops, a branch that adds in the Kubernetes example. Keep in mind that it doesn't quite work right, and things are possibly broken since my nixpkgs fork is so stale at this point. https://github.com/colemickens/nixops/commit/9e97fd4166e7062ddc510cd36b16228d112c815d https://github.com/colemickens/nixops/commit/9e97fd4166e7062...

aidenn0 10y ago

"If it weren't for a systemd-related bug..." I've started so many sentences with those exact words, and it kind of saddens me. I'm still hoping that the problems with systemd aren't fundamental to its architecture, and it just needs some more polishing. It certainly is incredibly ambitious as it aims to replace on the order of a dozen different pieces of software, so some hiccups are to be expected.

digi_owl 10y ago
Nah, its the mentality within the project. One that i think can be summed up as "code, compile, push, repeat". More and more it seems that the incoming generation treats everything like a web site that they can change at whim. Likely because they have had the internet and source repositories the whole time, and thus do not know the value of a truly stable and maintained system.

boothead 10y ago

I'd very much like to hear about using NixOS to provision kubernetes or mesos too.

colemickens 10y ago
I added some info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388571

cstrahan 10y ago

> Nix is one of those things that I explain and then have people telling me I'm wrong and/or an idiot because they can't believe that you can have a distribution based on building packages from source, backed by a binary cache. Hehe, same here. The number of times I'e had people tell me "uh, no, your package-manager/OS can't do that because <reasons that assume FHS dumping ground of libs/headers and global, mutable config state>" -- too many to count :). I'm still trying to find a 30 second sales pitch that manages to get through people's preconceived notions. If I can get someone to look over my shoulder at my terminal for about 5 minutes, that usually blows them away, but that's not always an option (like here in the comments section, vs coworkers at the office).