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What's the current position of Nix vs Guix? I tried NixPkgs for a while on a mac about a year ago, but it wasn't really functional (I submitted a half-dozen or

What's the current position of Nix vs Guix? I tried NixPkgs for a while on a mac about a year ago, but it wasn't really functional (I submitted a half-dozen or so bug reports, several were fixed, but I could see there was a long way to go towards a usefully working system...)

setra 10y ago
Nix is used / usable in production. Guix is still pretty far away.
- deleted 10y ago
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- rekado 10y ago
  This is not correct. There are at least three big bioinformatics clusters where Guix is used quite successfully (I know of large-scale deployments in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia). One of the deployments with 250 cluster nodes and uncounted GNU+Linux workstations is managed by me. I'd say it is very much usable and in fact used in production.
- aseipp 10y ago
  I dunno, honestly, if you're capable of using Nix in production, you're capable of using Guix in production almost certainly. I say this as a NixOS maintainer (though I'm relatively dormant these days). I see this as a thing of relative scale. Most people aren't going to run Nix, and in practice, using Nix requires a fair amount of work in practice (often including upstream work). If you're prepared to go through all that, you can probably use Guix in principle, too. (Barring some technicalities, of course, but in general I think this is still true.)
- davexunit 10y ago
  I use Guix in production to handle a very complicated dependency tree for some private speech recognition software.
deleted 10y ago
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Ixiaus 10y ago
NixOS and nixpkgs is very functional, we use it in production at the company I work for and I also use it as my full-time laptop OS (it's great as a laptop OS).
- seagreen 10y ago
  Nixpkgs on a mac actually has a really bad reputation as being undersupported. I use NixOS as my main OS though and it works fine.
  - ris 10y ago
    Now that nixpkgs' CI has an osx build, this may well get better.
vertex-four 10y ago
nixpkgs for Mac has never really been a priority, what's there is mostly contributed by a handful of people. It's certainly not got the same level of testing and use as e.g. Homebrew. It works wonderfully on Linux - especially under its own distribution, NixOS, which I run on my laptop.
cwp 10y ago
Bad timing. Yosemite broke basically everything in nixpkgs-darwin, and it took a long time to get everything fixed. I think that was mainly due to the switch from GCC to Clang and the accompanying toolchain, library and runtime changes. The good news it that the darwin stdenv is now "pure" in the functional sense. It bootstraps using /usr/bin/curl, and symlinks libSystem into the nix store, but otherwise doesn't rely on macOS at all. That makes it much more resilient to changes in macOS and Xcode.

setra 10y ago

Nix is used / usable in production. Guix is still pretty far away.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rekado 10y ago
This is not correct. There are at least three big bioinformatics clusters where Guix is used quite successfully (I know of large-scale deployments in Germany, the Netherlands, Australia). One of the deployments with 250 cluster nodes and uncounted GNU+Linux workstations is managed by me. I'd say it is very much usable and in fact used in production.
aseipp 10y ago
I dunno, honestly, if you're capable of using Nix in production, you're capable of using Guix in production almost certainly. I say this as a NixOS maintainer (though I'm relatively dormant these days). I see this as a thing of relative scale. Most people aren't going to run Nix, and in practice, using Nix requires a fair amount of work in practice (often including upstream work). If you're prepared to go through all that, you can probably use Guix in principle, too. (Barring some technicalities, of course, but in general I think this is still true.)
davexunit 10y ago
I use Guix in production to handle a very complicated dependency tree for some private speech recognition software.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Ixiaus 10y ago

NixOS and nixpkgs is very functional, we use it in production at the company I work for and I also use it as my full-time laptop OS (it's great as a laptop OS).

seagreen 10y ago
Nixpkgs on a mac actually has a really bad reputation as being undersupported. I use NixOS as my main OS though and it works fine.
- ris 10y ago
  Now that nixpkgs' CI has an osx build, this may well get better.

vertex-four 10y ago

nixpkgs for Mac has never really been a priority, what's there is mostly contributed by a handful of people. It's certainly not got the same level of testing and use as e.g. Homebrew. It works wonderfully on Linux - especially under its own distribution, NixOS, which I run on my laptop.

cwp 10y ago

Bad timing. Yosemite broke basically everything in nixpkgs-darwin, and it took a long time to get everything fixed. I think that was mainly due to the switch from GCC to Clang and the accompanying toolchain, library and runtime changes. The good news it that the darwin stdenv is now "pure" in the functional sense. It bootstraps using /usr/bin/curl, and symlinks libSystem into the nix store, but otherwise doesn't rely on macOS at all. That makes it much more resilient to changes in macOS and Xcode.