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> Straying off the beaten path quickly leads to a terrifying abyss. The contrast is remarkable. When everything you need is packaged and it just works, it's am

> Straying off the beaten path quickly leads to a terrifying abyss. The contrast is remarkable. When everything you need is packaged and it just works, it's amazing. Hands down the best system management experience I've had. And then one day you learn you've been dancing on the edge of a cliff. I'm hooked; there's no going back now for me. But there's at least one project (TidalCycles) that I simply gave up on ever running, because installing it requires peering deep inside the machine, and my psyche cannot handle it.

pxc 5y ago
J/w, have you ever packaged software for other distros? If yes, what made Nix more difficult here? If no, have you tried asking for help packaging TidalCycles on Matrix or Discourse? I'm wondering whether that's some especially oddly-behaved software, or if what's lacking here is some onboarding (that maybe can solved for you with a little community engagement or something).
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Nix is the only OS I've used where the standard installation instructions available in, say, the READMEs of things I want to install are a bad idea. Granted, whenever something is in nixpkgs it's a piece of cake, and almost everything I need is. But to install something not part of nixpkgs, I had to look under the hood in a way that no other platform has made me do. I've never packaged software on another platform. I packaged serialoscd and monomeserial, and the Discourse channel was critically helpful. It looks like I never tried engaging the community about TidalCycles. I found an old package, tried to fix it, couldn't.
  - pxc 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing your experience in more detail. I think Nixpkgs is easier to package for than a lot of ecosystems/distributions, but the obligation of _having_ to package for the distro in order to get things working in an ideal way is (reasonably!) more than many people want to have to deal with. (There is also a gap, kinda like across the built-in vs. have-to-package barrier, inside the Nixpkgs world, between software with reasonable/standard build systems and software with unique or ill-designed build processes.) I've been daydreaming about how this could be better for a little while now, and wondering what compromises it will require to the ‘purity’ of the system, how worthwhile they'll be for novice and advanced users, etc.

pxc 5y ago

J/w, have you ever packaged software for other distros? If yes, what made Nix more difficult here? If no, have you tried asking for help packaging TidalCycles on Matrix or Discourse? I'm wondering whether that's some especially oddly-behaved software, or if what's lacking here is some onboarding (that maybe can solved for you with a little community engagement or something).

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Nix is the only OS I've used where the standard installation instructions available in, say, the READMEs of things I want to install are a bad idea. Granted, whenever something is in nixpkgs it's a piece of cake, and almost everything I need is. But to install something not part of nixpkgs, I had to look under the hood in a way that no other platform has made me do. I've never packaged software on another platform. I packaged serialoscd and monomeserial, and the Discourse channel was critically helpful. It looks like I never tried engaging the community about TidalCycles. I found an old package, tried to fix it, couldn't.
- pxc 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience in more detail. I think Nixpkgs is easier to package for than a lot of ecosystems/distributions, but the obligation of _having_ to package for the distro in order to get things working in an ideal way is (reasonably!) more than many people want to have to deal with. (There is also a gap, kinda like across the built-in vs. have-to-package barrier, inside the Nixpkgs world, between software with reasonable/standard build systems and software with unique or ill-designed build processes.) I've been daydreaming about how this could be better for a little while now, and wondering what compromises it will require to the ‘purity’ of the system, how worthwhile they'll be for novice and advanced users, etc.