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Could you briefly mention an example of something that is difficult/impossible without first learning about Nix internals, and allude to what kind of internals
by gugagore 5y ago
Could you briefly mention an example of something that is difficult/impossible without first learning about Nix internals, and allude to what kind of internals need to be learned?
- mason55 5y agoFor starters, the recommended way for really understanding how to setup any package or option is to read the source in nixpkgs. Depends what you mean by "Nix internals" but for me that qualifies.
- rgoulter 5y agoAs one example, IIRC, I can run "npm install -g" on other Linux distributions, but can't with Nixpkgs (since npm will try to install the package to the nix store). Yarn would install it to the home folder.
- 0xCMP 5y agoYea this can be very annoying when a package is not already in nixpkgs or it's out of date. There was a similar issue if you didn't use Python virtualenvs properly, which was an early source of frustration for me personally.
- pxc 5y agoFwiw you can use `npm install -g` if you configure NPM to use your homedir for globally installed packages, as well. It's just not the default behavior.
- kaba0 5y agoAs another example, binary blobs are usually hard to get them to run. But steam-run (a base debian chroot, but you can even specifically build custom ones with only specific libraries available), or in the worst case just running a docker container can solve everything.