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>Installing emacs? You'll want to use the binary cache. No biggie. Except when it doesn't work, and your system update ends up building it from scratch--a two-h

by dqv 5y ago

>Installing emacs? You'll want to use the binary cache. No biggie. Except when it doesn't work, and your system update ends up building it from scratch--a two-hour process on my stalwart old desktop. Just don’t use emacs ;) In all seriousness, were you pulling from unstable? Disallowing installation because the hydra build is failing has gotten me, albeit for an obscure package I never use. >And flakes are explained in...uh...well, you'll figure it out. This is a funny quirk in the community I’ve seen, where everyone talks about using flakes but has a very difficult time of saying how. I finally figured out the weird incantation to get flakes to work. It was not trivial. (And the reason I’m not saying it here is because I simply don’t remember.)

AceJohnny2 5y ago
> I finally figured out the weird incantation to get flakes to work. It was not trivial. Care to share with the class? ;)
- pimeys 5y ago
  For the system, I like the devos template: https://github.com/divnix/devos https://github.com/divnix/devos The idea of flakes is how you define inputs, and you define the system (and packages, and shell etc.) in the outputs using the inputs. The inputs are git repos which point to other flakes. You can mix and match these as much as you want (see the devos repo for examples) and when you build the derivation, it generates a lockfile for exact commits in that point in time what were used in the given inputs. You commit the lockfile and in the other systems where you pull your config from the repo, it uses exactly those commits and installs the same versions as you did in your other systems. This was quite annoying and hard to do before flakes. Now it's easy. The problem what people face with building their system as a flake is combining the packages so you can point to `jq` from the unstable nixos and firefox from the stable train. I think this aspect needs better documentation so it wouldn't be so damn hard to learn (believe me, I know). Luckily there are projects like devos that give a nice template for people to play with (with documentation!) Another use for flakes is to create a development shell for your repo, an example what I did a while ago: https://github.com/pimeys/nix-prisma-example https://github.com/pimeys/nix-prisma-example Either have `nix-direnv` installed, enter the directory and say `direnv allow`, or just `nix develop` and it will gather, compile and install the correct versions of packages to your shell. Updating the packages? Call `nix flake update` in the directory, commit the lockfile and everybody else gets the new versions to their shell.
- 42jd 5y ago
  I wrote a blog post on NixOS/home manager configurations with nix flakes. I make sure to link out to other resources for those who don’t have the whole background. See: https://jdisaacs.com/blog/nixos-config/ https://jdisaacs.com/blog/nixos-config/

by dqv 5y ago

AceJohnny2 5y ago

> I finally figured out the weird incantation to get flakes to work. It was not trivial. Care to share with the class? ;)

pimeys 5y ago
For the system, I like the devos template: https://github.com/divnix/devos https://github.com/divnix/devos The idea of flakes is how you define inputs, and you define the system (and packages, and shell etc.) in the outputs using the inputs. The inputs are git repos which point to other flakes. You can mix and match these as much as you want (see the devos repo for examples) and when you build the derivation, it generates a lockfile for exact commits in that point in time what were used in the given inputs. You commit the lockfile and in the other systems where you pull your config from the repo, it uses exactly those commits and installs the same versions as you did in your other systems. This was quite annoying and hard to do before flakes. Now it's easy. The problem what people face with building their system as a flake is combining the packages so you can point to `jq` from the unstable nixos and firefox from the stable train. I think this aspect needs better documentation so it wouldn't be so damn hard to learn (believe me, I know). Luckily there are projects like devos that give a nice template for people to play with (with documentation!) Another use for flakes is to create a development shell for your repo, an example what I did a while ago: https://github.com/pimeys/nix-prisma-example https://github.com/pimeys/nix-prisma-example Either have `nix-direnv` installed, enter the directory and say `direnv allow`, or just `nix develop` and it will gather, compile and install the correct versions of packages to your shell. Updating the packages? Call `nix flake update` in the directory, commit the lockfile and everybody else gets the new versions to their shell.
42jd 5y ago
I wrote a blog post on NixOS/home manager configurations with nix flakes. I make sure to link out to other resources for those who don’t have the whole background. See: https://jdisaacs.com/blog/nixos-config/ https://jdisaacs.com/blog/nixos-config/