3 ms·

I find the nix language beautiful. The vast majority of the issues I have faced have been down to nixpkgs. Of course, nixpkgs is an incredible project, but it

I find the nix language beautiful. The vast majority of the issues I have faced have been down to nixpkgs. Of course, nixpkgs is an incredible project, but it lacks direction, uses bad practices everywhere, and pretty much all of the flaws you’d expect on a vast monorepo with a somewhat laissez-faire management approach. Oh, one other problem I had, I guess, was when MS removed a link to a Teams binary that was baked into nixpkgs, which meant I couldn’t rebuild my system without losing teams, until I fixed it with a custom derivation. I could also have fixed it by pinning the nixpkgs it came from to one with a working teams URL, but that seemed like too big of sledgehammer for a single application. One of the key assumptions made by nixpkgs, and by many hermeticity-focused projects, is that URLs stay alive and unmodified. They don’t promise that something will always build. They promise that it will build perfectly, exactly as you specified, or not at all. There’s a nice security element to that I guess. Nonetheless, NixOS is the best distro I’ve ever used. I certainly spent much more time fighting Arch, etc than I do NixOS - and I’ve never come across a problem I can’t work around with some nix code. So my position, I guess, is that NixOS is the second best distribution for me. The best is the one that builds on NixOS and has learned some mistakes, thrown away some technical debt, etc.

KingMachiavelli 3y ago
> One of the key assumptions made by nixpkgs, and by many hermeticity-focused projects, is that URLs stay alive and unmodified. They don’t promise that something will always build. They promise that it will build perfectly, exactly as you specified, or not at all. There’s a nice security element to that I guess. This shouldn't be the case since the main upstream substituter, cache.nixos.org, should have the derivation cached or at least the latest remote source/binary. MS Teams is an exception since it's licensed as "unfree" which likely prevent caching. I think there's a way to mark the remote src of the package as redistributible (if MS allows that) even if the final package/derivation is not destributible. Since external sources are content addressed, you can always manually add the source file via the `nix store add-file` or `nix store prefetch-file`.
n8henrie 3y ago
I presume that your system refused to switch into a now-broken system sans Teams? To me that seems like a huge win -- refusing to leave you with a broken or otherwise half-configured system. And if something did break? Rollback from the boot screen and you should be back in business (until you figure out how to pull in an overlay). Unless I misunderstood the predicament with which you were left.

KingMachiavelli 3y ago

> One of the key assumptions made by nixpkgs, and by many hermeticity-focused projects, is that URLs stay alive and unmodified. They don’t promise that something will always build. They promise that it will build perfectly, exactly as you specified, or not at all. There’s a nice security element to that I guess. This shouldn't be the case since the main upstream substituter, cache.nixos.org, should have the derivation cached or at least the latest remote source/binary. MS Teams is an exception since it's licensed as "unfree" which likely prevent caching. I think there's a way to mark the remote src of the package as redistributible (if MS allows that) even if the final package/derivation is not destributible. Since external sources are content addressed, you can always manually add the source file via the `nix store add-file` or `nix store prefetch-file`.

n8henrie 3y ago

I presume that your system refused to switch into a now-broken system sans Teams? To me that seems like a huge win -- refusing to leave you with a broken or otherwise half-configured system. And if something did break? Rollback from the boot screen and you should be back in business (until you figure out how to pull in an overlay). Unless I misunderstood the predicament with which you were left.