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Yeah, I'm a Nix user and fan but I'm still going to be stuck fixing it when it breaks. The biggest thing that I have to remind myself is that reproducible != "
by fnordlord 9mo ago
Yeah, I'm a Nix user and fan but I'm still going to be stuck fixing it when it breaks. The biggest thing that I have to remind myself is that reproducible != "just works." Once you get to what you want, you're set but until then and every change after, there's a chance you'll be in the weeds.
At least from my usage, the fact that your configuration is all tied to whether the entirety of nixpkgs-unstable is working can be a real headache.
Like recently when CMake was upgraded to 4.0, it took down a healthy handful of packages, which meant you couldn't update anything until things were resolved or you were really fluent in Nix hackery. (I was the former)
- nothrabannosir 9mo agoI have sworn off nixpkgs-unstable for basically anything but testing. I’m now on the 6 months stable release cadence and never going back. Much much better experience. Unstable really is unstable. And that’s great! But it’s not for me.
- craftkiller 9mo agoIt's really easy to pull those handful of packages from an older version of nixpkgs. I had to do that when there was some buggy firmware in the latest (at the time) version of linux-firmware. You just: 1. Add a new input to your flake of nixpkgs pinned to a specific commit or branch. For example: nixpkgs-91fab2d.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/91fab2d3e8ee06464f3c9896e84c97982b771fc3"; 2. Add an overlay where you replace those packages with versions from the older nixpkgs. For example: (final: prev: { inherit (pkgs-91fab2d) firefox libreoffice; })
- fnordlord 9mo agoThanks! I will write this down so I can try it out next time. I really want to get better at these little things but it can be tough sometimes without concrete examples like this.