4 ms·

> The problem is, documentation is sparse to non-existant, error messages are poor and often far from the actual problem, and it makes use of concept that lots

> The problem is, documentation is sparse to non-existant, error messages are poor and often far from the actual problem, and it makes use of concept that lots of people are not familiar with (like lazy evaluation) without ever explaining them, resulting in surprising semantics. I used NixOS and Home-Manager to run my entire system and home directory for a couple weeks earlier this year. The lack of clear documentation made me leave. Most of the time to find relevant information I'd have to go in some chat room since often the "official" documentation would be outdated. If the documentation was better I'd probably still be on it.

georgyo 5y ago
All the official documentation is autogenerated daily. What documentation did you find outdated?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Autogenerated documentation !== up-to-date and/or good documentation. Autogenerated means "we take these particular strings and texts and dump them in a different format". It says nothing about whether they are even remotely up to date.
  - georgyo 5y ago
    Sure, but in my experience the documentation from the source has always been correct. There is tons of stuff on other websites that is outdated, but the source documentation has not suffered the same atrophy. More importantly, much of the documentation is auto generated not from arbitrary doc strings, but from the nix expressions themselves. IE: https://search.nixos.org/options https://search.nixos.org/options? So I believe there was another source of the misinformation then the official docs.
    - Narice 5y ago
      Most probably NixOS Wiki, it's not official but always comes up as the top result because the manual's titles are irrelevent when you're trying to solve a specific issue. The NixOS Wiki is very helpful in a lot of ways (there is more info than in the manuals and you don't have to troubleshoot for hours because you missed activating some options), butit is true that it is sometimes outdated :/
    - EE84M3i 5y ago
      One example: nix-pills introduces nix-env -i[1] as the third "pill" -- isn't this basically deprecated and never recommended by serious uesrs? [1]: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/enter-environment.html https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/enter-environment.html

georgyo 5y ago

All the official documentation is autogenerated daily. What documentation did you find outdated?

dmitriid 5y ago
Autogenerated documentation !== up-to-date and/or good documentation. Autogenerated means "we take these particular strings and texts and dump them in a different format". It says nothing about whether they are even remotely up to date.
- georgyo 5y ago
  Sure, but in my experience the documentation from the source has always been correct. There is tons of stuff on other websites that is outdated, but the source documentation has not suffered the same atrophy. More importantly, much of the documentation is auto generated not from arbitrary doc strings, but from the nix expressions themselves. IE: https://search.nixos.org/options https://search.nixos.org/options? So I believe there was another source of the misinformation then the official docs.
  - Narice 5y ago
    Most probably NixOS Wiki, it's not official but always comes up as the top result because the manual's titles are irrelevent when you're trying to solve a specific issue. The NixOS Wiki is very helpful in a lot of ways (there is more info than in the manuals and you don't have to troubleshoot for hours because you missed activating some options), butit is true that it is sometimes outdated :/
  - EE84M3i 5y ago
    One example: nix-pills introduces nix-env -i[1] as the third "pill" -- isn't this basically deprecated and never recommended by serious uesrs? [1]: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/enter-environment.html https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/enter-environment.html