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> It's been there for 15 or 20 years. Has it? What I remember being the standard practice for customizing packages was apt-get source && sudo apt-get build-
by pxc 4y ago
> It's been there for 15 or 20 years.
Has it? What I remember being the standard practice for customizing packages was
apt-get source && sudo apt-get build-dep && vim <something> && debuild -b
fewer than 15 years ago. And it's not much like what the parent poster has in mind. It modifies the global state of your system, it requires multiple steps, it produces a different artifact than you might get in the repos at any given time, it leaves things in your CWD on your filesystem owned by your current user, whatever.
(Some of that may also apply to `apt-get source --build`, idk.)
With Nix or Guix, when a cached binary artifact for a given package is missing, you may not even notice, the fallback to building from source is so transparent.
I encourage you to actually try Nix or Guix, including writing packages for them, and including adding a patch or overriding a build flags in an existing package, to see how the model is really different.
> Also Debian has been doing reproducible builds before Nix.
What Debian does for reproducible builds and how Nix embodies reproducibility are qualitatively different. If you understood both, you'd understand why this is a silly point to raise.
(Debian's work on reproducible builds is great. Every distro benefits from most of it, and everyone in the Nix community is grateful for it.)
- tremon 4y agoWith Nix or Guix, when a cached binary artifact for a given package is missing, you may not even notice, the fallback to building from source is so transparent. I consider this to be one of the main drawbacks of these systems -- it assumes that every machine is build-capable. I do not want compilers installed on my production servers (nor would I want my RPi to attempt to rebuild half the world because the package server was down). I'm not sure how Nix handles this, but I'm pretty sure that's not possible with Guix.
- pxc 4y ago> it assumes that every machine is build-capable It doesn't, fortunately. You can tell Nix to rely exclusively on the binary cache, or configure it to have 0 build threads locally and use remote builders. For a server deployment, many popular choices don't have the server build anything, and in some cases it may not even have any users who are allowed to invoke `nix-*` or anything.
- tazjin 4y agoTo be fair, the whole concept of manually installing individual packages on production servers (especially when they run NixOS!) is a complete anti-pattern, so that situation wouldn't even occur during normal operation.
- goodpoint 4y agoPlease do not assume I don't know what Nix and Guix do. > you'd understand why this is a silly point to raise It isn't.