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What solution wouldn't require its own specification + quirks? Whether its a Dockerfile or nix package I don't see the difference besides people tend to be fami

by jzoch 5y ago

What solution wouldn't require its own specification + quirks? Whether its a Dockerfile or nix package I don't see the difference besides people tend to be familiar with only 1 of the many options. Im not comparing whether Dockerfiles or buildpacks or nix packages are more ergonomic than one another but i do think your comment is...misguided. From what I have heard Nix is pretty wonderful to use and simplifies the problem - it just requires you learn about Nix a bit which i think is a fair trade-off for the benefits it supposedly provides

csande17 5y ago
You're right that Docker is similar to Nix, at least in the sense they both seem to be trying to work around problems with the Linux packaging and library ecosystem by piling more of their own complexity on top. I suspect the comment you replied to wants to see the actual underlying problem solved. To use an example from another community, no amount of performance improvements to NPM will ever make it a good idea to depend on hundreds of one-liner "is number odd" or "left pad" packages. Papering over the problem with yet more technology only ossifies it, making it harder to solve for real.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cormacrelf 5y ago
Anyone can build their first Dockerfile and deploy it for Node.js or similar in like 5 minutes. The tricks that make images smaller later use the same concepts and syntax. There is a reason it took over the world so quickly. Nix ... I have so far spent about 10 hours learning it to manage my machine. I have forgotten about 98% of it and abandoned the project. You feel like you're sitting in the middle of a spider web, and you can sense the whole system at once. Literally none of your prior knowledge of how to use a computer will help you. None of your existing build tool CLI can be used. Every package manager needs a nix-ifier, like node2nix. Everything you see in a nix file will have to be googled, searched in the documentation, searched in GitHub repos for some kind of example. Nix has rebuilt the world from scratch. If you're trying to make the next big thing, try to make it leverage people's existing knowledge. One truly excellent example is `compile_commands.json`. It does a very similar thing to Docker, where it extracts information from your existing build process, without actually changing the build process. The problem statement was that people wanted LSP (and predecessors) implementations to have access to a list of input files to a C/C++ compiler, but they didn't want to abandon Make and CMake etc. So they basically made a structured log of all the CC invocations, and a wrapper around CC that would parse the arguments and write to the log in JSON format. These days you get it for free with CMake[0]. You can use it with nearly every C/C++ build system on earth with a single CC=... argument to make. [0]: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS.html https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_EXPORT_CO...
- tadfisher 5y ago
  Your compile_commands.json example is essentially what tools like node2nix produce. For saner build systems, e.g. cmake and meson, simply including the build tool package in `nativeBuildInputs` along with dependent packages in `buildInputs` suffices to build 90% of C/C++ packages with Nix, with the remaining 10% being Qt (I jest). The real killer app for Nix is in testing now, and that's the "flakes" feature. Lots of this stuff will get way easier to use when you can throw "github:owner/repo" in an `inputs` set and get a working Nix builder for your project without needing to read through nixpkgs. I hope you give it a try again sometime, as it has changed my perspective on how software should be built, distributed, trusted, and deployed.
  - cormacrelf 5y ago
    Nix is still trying to be a thing that replaces other build tools. The generated nix file is a recipe for doing what “npm publish” does when it builds a tgz. Every single language has a different way of doing this, and will require its own *2nix to be maintained alongside changes to eg package.json, Cargo.toml, Package.swift. The 2nix bit is the hard part; every package manager has to be re-implemented. Docker does not have this problem at all. Every build tool on earth works with it, with zero configuration. Compile_commands.json may have similar output to node2nix etc, but it infects nothing, replaces nothing. It works with all the different makefile alternatives with no additional effort. The closest similarity is with Docker: Docker builders intercept at the file system layer, covering every build system ever; compile_commands at the standard GCC-compatible shell arguments layer, covering ~all C build systems and compilers. Nix does not intercept anywhere, it asks you to use a new tool to do everything from scratch in a Nix-compatible way, covering no build systems. That’s not to say it isn’t great when you have already built a Nixified package manager replacement for your specific language ecosystem. But it’s not going to take over the world like Docker and compile_commands did. Imploring people to give it a shot is the only way, unfortunately. I will remain open to it, especially if someone can figure out a force-multiplier for these 2nix implementations.
    - cormacrelf 5y ago

by jzoch 5y ago

csande17 5y ago

You're right that Docker is similar to Nix, at least in the sense they both seem to be trying to work around problems with the Linux packaging and library ecosystem by piling more of their own complexity on top. I suspect the comment you replied to wants to see the actual underlying problem solved. To use an example from another community, no amount of performance improvements to NPM will ever make it a good idea to depend on hundreds of one-liner "is number odd" or "left pad" packages. Papering over the problem with yet more technology only ossifies it, making it harder to solve for real.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cormacrelf 5y ago

Anyone can build their first Dockerfile and deploy it for Node.js or similar in like 5 minutes. The tricks that make images smaller later use the same concepts and syntax. There is a reason it took over the world so quickly. Nix ... I have so far spent about 10 hours learning it to manage my machine. I have forgotten about 98% of it and abandoned the project. You feel like you're sitting in the middle of a spider web, and you can sense the whole system at once. Literally none of your prior knowledge of how to use a computer will help you. None of your existing build tool CLI can be used. Every package manager needs a nix-ifier, like node2nix. Everything you see in a nix file will have to be googled, searched in the documentation, searched in GitHub repos for some kind of example. Nix has rebuilt the world from scratch. If you're trying to make the next big thing, try to make it leverage people's existing knowledge. One truly excellent example is `compile_commands.json`. It does a very similar thing to Docker, where it extracts information from your existing build process, without actually changing the build process. The problem statement was that people wanted LSP (and predecessors) implementations to have access to a list of input files to a C/C++ compiler, but they didn't want to abandon Make and CMake etc. So they basically made a structured log of all the CC invocations, and a wrapper around CC that would parse the arguments and write to the log in JSON format. These days you get it for free with CMake[0]. You can use it with nearly every C/C++ build system on earth with a single CC=... argument to make. [0]: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS.html https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_EXPORT_CO...

tadfisher 5y ago
Your compile_commands.json example is essentially what tools like node2nix produce. For saner build systems, e.g. cmake and meson, simply including the build tool package in `nativeBuildInputs` along with dependent packages in `buildInputs` suffices to build 90% of C/C++ packages with Nix, with the remaining 10% being Qt (I jest). The real killer app for Nix is in testing now, and that's the "flakes" feature. Lots of this stuff will get way easier to use when you can throw "github:owner/repo" in an `inputs` set and get a working Nix builder for your project without needing to read through nixpkgs. I hope you give it a try again sometime, as it has changed my perspective on how software should be built, distributed, trusted, and deployed.
- cormacrelf 5y ago
  Nix is still trying to be a thing that replaces other build tools. The generated nix file is a recipe for doing what “npm publish” does when it builds a tgz. Every single language has a different way of doing this, and will require its own *2nix to be maintained alongside changes to eg package.json, Cargo.toml, Package.swift. The 2nix bit is the hard part; every package manager has to be re-implemented. Docker does not have this problem at all. Every build tool on earth works with it, with zero configuration. Compile_commands.json may have similar output to node2nix etc, but it infects nothing, replaces nothing. It works with all the different makefile alternatives with no additional effort. The closest similarity is with Docker: Docker builders intercept at the file system layer, covering every build system ever; compile_commands at the standard GCC-compatible shell arguments layer, covering ~all C build systems and compilers. Nix does not intercept anywhere, it asks you to use a new tool to do everything from scratch in a Nix-compatible way, covering no build systems. That’s not to say it isn’t great when you have already built a Nixified package manager replacement for your specific language ecosystem. But it’s not going to take over the world like Docker and compile_commands did. Imploring people to give it a shot is the only way, unfortunately. I will remain open to it, especially if someone can figure out a force-multiplier for these 2nix implementations.
  - cormacrelf 5y ago