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So, Mac doesn't come with a package manager. There are things you can do with port and brew, to alleviate some pain. Me personally, I fool around with a lot of

by jfoutz 3y ago

So, Mac doesn't come with a package manager. There are things you can do with port and brew, to alleviate some pain. Me personally, I fool around with a lot of languages, and sometimes I don't quite keep every project up to date with the latest version. For work, the situation is even more challenging, because I don't have the authority to go tell teams to upgrade or not upgrade, but sometimes I need to build their projects. None of this is really Mac specific. I used to use virtual box for this, which worked pretty well. I could set up a baseline environment and snapshot new boxes with new language revs. Docker can kind of cover this, but I tend to over do it, breaking things out into the one you build with, and the one you run with, and it's fine, but it's a lot to keep in my head. So, I'm kinda flakey about that. Now, I'm slowly building up some proficiency with nix. I think this is what I really want, to swap out the whole chain of system dependencies, and build docker containers or vms out of that if I need them. Perhaps I'm a poor sysadmin. _everything_ locally installed makes things real weird after a while (years).

cj 3y ago
> Perhaps I'm a poor sysadmin. _everything_ locally installed makes things real weird after a while (years). Same experience here (years). Because it’s something that creeps up over time, the problems aren’t obvious overnight.
- fsflover 3y ago
  This is one of the good reasons to use Qubes OS.
- moojd 3y ago
  My path was vm -> containers -> nix. With nix flakes and the direnv extension in vscode you can get a clean per-project dev environment with zero docker overhead and without dev tools cluttering up your global environment and causing issues.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Use orbstack, install things in their own container, Mount local volumes
- jfoutz 3y ago
  That looks really nice. I'm sure it's a great solution for lots of developers. I think I'm going to stick with nix. VM's, docker, orbstack and nix all seem to let me make a machine that looks like "X". The thing is, docker and VM's provide an abstraction that works 95% of the time, but that last 5% is awful (I don't know about orbstack). Nix, by all appearances (and my limited experience) is much much worse up front. there's a lot to learn. But in exchange I get to keep control. This abstraction is wrong, we're not doing that, we're doing this. I'm not asking, I'm telling.

by jfoutz 3y ago

cj 3y ago

> Perhaps I'm a poor sysadmin. _everything_ locally installed makes things real weird after a while (years). Same experience here (years). Because it’s something that creeps up over time, the problems aren’t obvious overnight.

fsflover 3y ago
This is one of the good reasons to use Qubes OS.
moojd 3y ago
My path was vm -> containers -> nix. With nix flakes and the direnv extension in vscode you can get a clean per-project dev environment with zero docker overhead and without dev tools cluttering up your global environment and causing issues.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Use orbstack, install things in their own container, Mount local volumes

jfoutz 3y ago
That looks really nice. I'm sure it's a great solution for lots of developers. I think I'm going to stick with nix. VM's, docker, orbstack and nix all seem to let me make a machine that looks like "X". The thing is, docker and VM's provide an abstraction that works 95% of the time, but that last 5% is awful (I don't know about orbstack). Nix, by all appearances (and my limited experience) is much much worse up front. there's a lot to learn. But in exchange I get to keep control. This abstraction is wrong, we're not doing that, we're doing this. I'm not asking, I'm telling.