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I'm not so sure making nix comprehensible is realistic. When technologies fall under this level of complexity they require die hard fans to use it and keep it a

I'm not so sure making nix comprehensible is realistic. When technologies fall under this level of complexity they require die hard fans to use it and keep it alive In all honesty, I would consider a complete rewrite at this point. I don't think there's a lot of hope for nix right now outside of hobbyists and researchers. Not saying this to be rude, but genuinely, take what you all have learned, take a sober look at the state of it, improve it. Almost no one will be willing to cope with it in it's current state docs or not. If it was the next docker/podman/etc you'd of known by now... It's not getting there, revert course

otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> outside of hobbyists and researchers No data on this, but I'm pretty sure Nix is used mostly by for-profit companies trying to tame complexity on a limited budget. It's not nice or pretty, but there's very little alternative unless you're ready to keep a whole team of developers just fixing Dockerfiles all day.
- crabbygrabby 4y ago
  I've used it in industry and it was nothing short of a disaster. Only one person could fix builds, despite many genuinely brilliant engineers putting in hours to learn it. More so, the time sink... Literally, what takes 29 minutes for a fresher to do in docker takes them two weeks with nothing to show for it in nix. Absolutely do not recommend it for industry whatsoever. Most people, except the one advocate for it, see it as a failed experiment.
  - otabdeveloper4 4y ago
    If you work in a place where you have teams (multiple) of developers doing Docker crap, then nix is probably not for you. To each his own, it targets an entirely different niche.
WickedSmoke 4y ago
Recently someone has been trying to build a Nix package of an open source game I maintain, so I had a brief look at the project. It does appear to be an experiment in package management that got out of hand. Basic usability is lacking, as I was unable to even get a listing of available packages on a NixOS virtual machine due to nix-env requiring well over 1GB of RAM. This flagrant waste of resources doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the tools. I'd rather see existing packaging data leveraged rather than adding a new language to the mix. Something like a translator or interpreter for RPM .spec files, for example.
- jbboehr 4y ago
  Listing all packages is a bit of a weak spot. The entire package set is described in a lazy, functional language and listing or searching it requires evaluating the entire thing. A normal build will only require evaluating a small subset of the entire package list. `nix search` should have caching of results but it still requires evaluation to be populated.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

> outside of hobbyists and researchers No data on this, but I'm pretty sure Nix is used mostly by for-profit companies trying to tame complexity on a limited budget. It's not nice or pretty, but there's very little alternative unless you're ready to keep a whole team of developers just fixing Dockerfiles all day.

crabbygrabby 4y ago
I've used it in industry and it was nothing short of a disaster. Only one person could fix builds, despite many genuinely brilliant engineers putting in hours to learn it. More so, the time sink... Literally, what takes 29 minutes for a fresher to do in docker takes them two weeks with nothing to show for it in nix. Absolutely do not recommend it for industry whatsoever. Most people, except the one advocate for it, see it as a failed experiment.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  If you work in a place where you have teams (multiple) of developers doing Docker crap, then nix is probably not for you. To each his own, it targets an entirely different niche.

WickedSmoke 4y ago

Recently someone has been trying to build a Nix package of an open source game I maintain, so I had a brief look at the project. It does appear to be an experiment in package management that got out of hand. Basic usability is lacking, as I was unable to even get a listing of available packages on a NixOS virtual machine due to nix-env requiring well over 1GB of RAM. This flagrant waste of resources doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the tools. I'd rather see existing packaging data leveraged rather than adding a new language to the mix. Something like a translator or interpreter for RPM .spec files, for example.

jbboehr 4y ago
Listing all packages is a bit of a weak spot. The entire package set is described in a lazy, functional language and listing or searching it requires evaluating the entire thing. A normal build will only require evaluating a small subset of the entire package list. `nix search` should have caching of results but it still requires evaluation to be populated.