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I think you missed the key point. Software needs to be altered to run on Nix, and it needs to do so _systematically_. Grab a script from the internet? Edit the

I think you missed the key point. Software needs to be altered to run on Nix, and it needs to do so _systematically_. Grab a script from the internet? Edit the shebang! Download some prebuilt software? Good luck finding /lib/ld-linux.so.2! Need to use some proprietary software you cannot edit? HALP! Of course there must be some tooling to get around this, since stuff like steam is available (at least I hope), or else anything not packaged by nix would be a nightmare to install and use as a user. Any niche or domain specific software would become unusable. Take for example Quartus II or Vivado (just to name the two top FPGA EDAs), those two are not packaged by nix. Yes, there are a few recipes floating around, but those honestly scare me enough to not want to do it with more obscure tools like those for other, smaller brands, FPGAs. (disclaimer: I never used nix, but that's my understanding from the article, and my own experience running proprietary stuff)

Ericson2314 5y ago
Hehe Quartus II is terrifying. It is like 10s of gigs of basically it's own distro. I have seen it showhorned into Nix but at the end of data it's a garbage heap of a "package". Nice example :) Yeah for me it's just more interesting to attack the problem at the root: developer UX, autogenerating packages from things like Cargo.toml, etc.. Prebuilt binaries is not something I really care about that much, and are existing tools do handle it quite well surprisingly automatically . It's linux, if you are using some rando prebuilt binaries (not your distro's, or other trusted build artifacts cache) it's always a tragedy.
kwohlfahrt 5y ago
I actually added Quartus Prime in nixpkgs a couple years ago! Haven't gotten round to the 2021 update, but that should get rid of the annoying 32-bit dependencies. [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1e643a385290e54947594ac241d4cf407348910c/pkgs/applications/editors/quartus-prime/default.nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1e643a385290e54947594a...
sicariusnoctis 5y ago
Side note: It would be nice to have a way to look up library -> package name.
aidenn0 5y ago
I suspect that the FPGA EDAs should run fin under steam-run. Packaging up giant balls of binaries is a mess.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Hehe Quartus II is terrifying. It is like 10s of gigs of basically it's own distro. I have seen it showhorned into Nix but at the end of data it's a garbage heap of a "package". Nice example :) Yeah for me it's just more interesting to attack the problem at the root: developer UX, autogenerating packages from things like Cargo.toml, etc.. Prebuilt binaries is not something I really care about that much, and are existing tools do handle it quite well surprisingly automatically . It's linux, if you are using some rando prebuilt binaries (not your distro's, or other trusted build artifacts cache) it's always a tragedy.

kwohlfahrt 5y ago

I actually added Quartus Prime in nixpkgs a couple years ago! Haven't gotten round to the 2021 update, but that should get rid of the annoying 32-bit dependencies. [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1e643a385290e54947594ac241d4cf407348910c/pkgs/applications/editors/quartus-prime/default.nix https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1e643a385290e54947594a...

sicariusnoctis 5y ago

Side note: It would be nice to have a way to look up library -> package name.

aidenn0 5y ago

I suspect that the FPGA EDAs should run fin under steam-run. Packaging up giant balls of binaries is a mess.