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That's exactly what Nix does! Nix is wonderful tech that unfortunately seems doomed to low adoption due to poor usability. My belief is that this stems the fact

That's exactly what Nix does! Nix is wonderful tech that unfortunately seems doomed to low adoption due to poor usability. My belief is that this stems the fact that maintaining the package tree is obscenely costly of contributor time, leaving almost no time or energy to make progress on "niceties" like improving the core CLI experience and the continuous integration system.

rspeer 8y ago
I once started trying to learn about Nix. All the up-to-date documentation I could find, however, was about NixOS. I would like to use Nix just to manage my local development environment on Ubuntu, not to replace my entire operating system. Is that something the developers are still interested in? Is there documentation?
- jumblemuddle 8y ago
  Have a look here: https://nixos.org/nix/manual/ https://nixos.org/nix/manual/ There's a dropdown in the top-left corner to switch between nix-related projects. (NixOS, NixOps, etc.)
  - andreabedini 8y ago
    I found nix-pills more useful than the manual: https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html
manveru 8y ago
The Nix team (in particular grahamc with https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg) is working hard on making CI better . But it's true that the on-boarding experience and CLI could be much improved. It's quite frustrating to me, because after I've been using Nix & NixOS for about 3 years now, there's no way I'd go back to the insanity out there. I never had the amount of stability, control, and predictability on any other platform, from configuring my OS, editors, WM, shell, random ricing, or building VMs, Servers, Docker containers, production deploys, development environments, there's really not much Nix can't handle. But getting familiar with Nix took some serious effort I'm sure not many people can afford. I begin to understand how frustrated people in the Lisp and Smalltalk communities must feel while people slowly reinvent everything they've enjoyed for decades (and Nix is still in its teens). Teaching people about the value of having just a single package manager, no matter what OS or language they're using, is mostly futile because there's so much value attributed to being "mainstream" that now we have hundreds of mainstream package managers with varying degrees of sophistication, security, predictability, and ability to _not_ try and take over your system. I use it to build and develop Go, Ruby, JS, Crystal, Elm, Mint, Haskell, Perl, Bash, VimL, Elisp, Guile, and whatever else comes my way. All I have to do to get a working and isolated dev env is go into that directory and let nix-shell do the rest. On NixOS you also get nixos-container with all its benefits, so I can test whole networks or just spin up some DBs, all behaving exactly the same they'll be once deployed by simply reusing that configuration. Of course it also manages Systemd, so I guess we'll just write yet another function to slap a checksum on those containers and control them as well, it's just a shame that humanity loses so much time reinventing the wheel every few months. On the other hand, there's still a lot of opportunities for start-ups in that space, like https://nixcloud.io https://nixcloud.io, https://www.tweag.io https://www.tweag.io (they just hired Eelco Dolstra so he can work full-time on the Nix core), https://www.packet.net https://www.packet.net (they sponsor almost all our new CI infrastructure), or https://vpsfree.org/ https://vpsfree.org/ (first one to offer their own NixOS based distro specifically made for VPSs), which are all doing well.
- donbright 8y ago
  i spent a lot of time trying to make nix the 'standard build environment' for an open source project. it was going really really well, even on top of standard distros like ubunutu, redhat, etc. the problem is OpenGL and Nvidia. NiX doesnt want to deal with NVidia's closed source drivers, and i can't blame them, i got so depressed working on the issue, that i gave up looking into it. there is no good solution. there are only kludges and kludges of kludges.

rspeer 8y ago

I once started trying to learn about Nix. All the up-to-date documentation I could find, however, was about NixOS. I would like to use Nix just to manage my local development environment on Ubuntu, not to replace my entire operating system. Is that something the developers are still interested in? Is there documentation?

jumblemuddle 8y ago
Have a look here: https://nixos.org/nix/manual/ https://nixos.org/nix/manual/ There's a dropdown in the top-left corner to switch between nix-related projects. (NixOS, NixOps, etc.)
- andreabedini 8y ago
  I found nix-pills more useful than the manual: https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html

manveru 8y ago

The Nix team (in particular grahamc with https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg https://github.com/NixOS/ofborg) is working hard on making CI better . But it's true that the on-boarding experience and CLI could be much improved. It's quite frustrating to me, because after I've been using Nix & NixOS for about 3 years now, there's no way I'd go back to the insanity out there. I never had the amount of stability, control, and predictability on any other platform, from configuring my OS, editors, WM, shell, random ricing, or building VMs, Servers, Docker containers, production deploys, development environments, there's really not much Nix can't handle. But getting familiar with Nix took some serious effort I'm sure not many people can afford. I begin to understand how frustrated people in the Lisp and Smalltalk communities must feel while people slowly reinvent everything they've enjoyed for decades (and Nix is still in its teens). Teaching people about the value of having just a single package manager, no matter what OS or language they're using, is mostly futile because there's so much value attributed to being "mainstream" that now we have hundreds of mainstream package managers with varying degrees of sophistication, security, predictability, and ability to _not_ try and take over your system. I use it to build and develop Go, Ruby, JS, Crystal, Elm, Mint, Haskell, Perl, Bash, VimL, Elisp, Guile, and whatever else comes my way. All I have to do to get a working and isolated dev env is go into that directory and let nix-shell do the rest. On NixOS you also get nixos-container with all its benefits, so I can test whole networks or just spin up some DBs, all behaving exactly the same they'll be once deployed by simply reusing that configuration. Of course it also manages Systemd, so I guess we'll just write yet another function to slap a checksum on those containers and control them as well, it's just a shame that humanity loses so much time reinventing the wheel every few months. On the other hand, there's still a lot of opportunities for start-ups in that space, like https://nixcloud.io https://nixcloud.io, https://www.tweag.io https://www.tweag.io (they just hired Eelco Dolstra so he can work full-time on the Nix core), https://www.packet.net https://www.packet.net (they sponsor almost all our new CI infrastructure), or https://vpsfree.org/ https://vpsfree.org/ (first one to offer their own NixOS based distro specifically made for VPSs), which are all doing well.

donbright 8y ago
i spent a lot of time trying to make nix the 'standard build environment' for an open source project. it was going really really well, even on top of standard distros like ubunutu, redhat, etc. the problem is OpenGL and Nvidia. NiX doesnt want to deal with NVidia's closed source drivers, and i can't blame them, i got so depressed working on the issue, that i gave up looking into it. there is no good solution. there are only kludges and kludges of kludges.