Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)
by soraminazuki on Monday December 09, 2019 @09:48PM
(#21749167)
> That fails to address both problems stated by the OP
This is wrong and unfair. One of the major problems the OP has with Docker is that many software builds are unreproducible, encouraging many people to deploy binaries of dubious quality. Nix tries to solve precisely this problem through better tooling which makes it easy to ensure that its packages are reproducible and its dependencies easily verifiable. This is also what makes Nix distinct from Debian, which tries to improve package quality through policies and community collaboration.
> Nix requires the build process to be "free from side effects"
I disagree that this makes Nix irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Another gripe the OP had with Docker is that it sandboxes entire apps, making it a blackbox. Nix does sandboxing on a more granular level, which provides more transparency into individual packages.
This is wrong and unfair. One of the major problems the OP has with Docker is that many software builds are unreproducible, encouraging many people to deploy binaries of dubious quality. Nix tries to solve precisely this problem through better tooling which makes it easy to ensure that its packages are reproducible and its dependencies easily verifiable. This is also what makes Nix distinct from Debian, which tries to improve package quality through policies and community collaboration.
> Nix requires the build process to be "free from side effects"
I disagree that this makes Nix irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Another gripe the OP had with Docker is that it sandboxes entire apps, making it a blackbox. Nix does sandboxing on a more granular level, which provides more transparency into individual packages.