News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Nix as OS X Package Manager by geocar on Thursday May 26, 2016 @03:23AM (#11776221)
> In my experience with software, sharing opaque binary blobs is a Bad Thing

And yet you don't know why.

This is called dogma, and dogma is bad: It leads people to make stupid decisions over and over, all the while repeating that the alternative is worse.

Re:Nix as OS X Package Manager by adekok on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:16PM (#11781155)
> This is called dogma,

Then you don't know what the word "dogma" means.

What I said was "In my experience." i.e. practice learned over time.

This cannot be interpreted by any reasonable person as "blobs are bad, just 'cause."

That kind of straw man argument leads me to conclude that similar issues are being your inability to understand the use of reproducability.

Re:Nix as OS X Package Manager by geocar on Friday May 27, 2016 @06:25AM (#11785028)
Dogma: a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.[1]

You aren't offering any evidence or justification besides the statement. I might as well say, "in my experience, ``reproducability (sic) is a waste of time''" -- what's the point of that?

Instead, I'm providing concrete examples of why it's a waste of time, and rather than anyone arguing the contrary, they're doing exactly what you're doing: Repeating that there's some point of "reproducability" (sic). There isn't, you're wrong. End of.

But whatever, my background isn't physics, so what could I possibly know? Running engineering teams for the last two decades that have to develop and deal with high volume, high uptime application servers only means my systems have to work and make money, not that they be "reproducable" (sic).

[1]: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dogma

Re:Nix as OS X Package Manager by Singletoned on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:14AM (#11776428)
No, this is called learning from experience.

If you put your hand in a fire 5 times and it burns you 5 times, you don't have to understand anything about fire to know that you should probably stop putting your hand in. And if you saw other people about to put their hand in, you would mention to them that everytime you put your hand in, you end up regretting it.

Re:Nix as OS X Package Manager by geocar on Thursday May 26, 2016 @05:02AM (#11776587)
And yet, here I have asbestos gloves and I can put them in the fire just fine. This allows me to work faster and get done without waiting a day for the fire to run out of fuel.

We don't need religion to keep from getting burned when we have tools.

Re:Nix as OS X Package Manager by Singletoned on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @04:03AM (#11812779)
And again, you don't need to have any understanding of asbestos in order for the gloves to work. You can believe that they are magic gloves from God, and they will work just as well.