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If you're not willing to install a whole new OS, nix , the package manager of nixos, is standalone and can be run in a single user without interferring with sy

If you're not willing to install a whole new OS, nix , the package manager of nixos, is standalone and can be run in a single user without interferring with system packages. It's a great way to familiarize yourself with the system. [0] I use Nix together with ArchLinux now to set up consistent development environments and it has been great. It's also blazingly fast because of Hydra[1], their continious build system. [0] http://nixos.org/nix http://nixos.org/nix [1] http://nixos.org/hydra http://nixos.org/hydra

agumonkey 12y ago
Indeed, it was a neat way to develop in isolation when I needed it (PHP).
nextos 12y ago
I'm currently using the same setup (arch + nix). It's nice. However, some practical aspects of nix are quite ugly. It lacks decoupling between packages and optional runtime dependencies. You can disable optional dependencies, but this would lead to a different package hash negating the use of prebuilt binaries. Therefore, the culture seems to have all default package builds with all optional dependencies on. This leads to situations such as installing mutt and getting python too! (mutt -> gpgme -> glib -> python) Last time I checked, if you installed git, you'd also get subversion, etc. Quite sad, given that nix is full of so many fantastic ideas.
foobarqux 12y ago
> can be run in a single user without interferring with system packages. Can it? It seemed to require root to install when I last tried.
- Nullabillity 12y ago
  The default setup requires root, but everything is does is contained to /nix and ~/.nix* . /nix (the part that requires root) is just a cache, and you can actually change the location to somewhere user-local in the settings. However, this affects all the package hashes, which will make Nix recompile everything instead of reusing the prebuilt binaries from Hydra.
foobarqux 12y ago
How does package security work in Nix? How does security compare to apt?

agumonkey 12y ago

Indeed, it was a neat way to develop in isolation when I needed it (PHP).

nextos 12y ago

I'm currently using the same setup (arch + nix). It's nice. However, some practical aspects of nix are quite ugly. It lacks decoupling between packages and optional runtime dependencies. You can disable optional dependencies, but this would lead to a different package hash negating the use of prebuilt binaries. Therefore, the culture seems to have all default package builds with all optional dependencies on. This leads to situations such as installing mutt and getting python too! (mutt -> gpgme -> glib -> python) Last time I checked, if you installed git, you'd also get subversion, etc. Quite sad, given that nix is full of so many fantastic ideas.

foobarqux 12y ago

> can be run in a single user without interferring with system packages. Can it? It seemed to require root to install when I last tried.

Nullabillity 12y ago
The default setup requires root, but everything is does is contained to /nix and ~/.nix* . /nix (the part that requires root) is just a cache, and you can actually change the location to somewhere user-local in the settings. However, this affects all the package hashes, which will make Nix recompile everything instead of reusing the prebuilt binaries from Hydra.

foobarqux 12y ago

How does package security work in Nix? How does security compare to apt?