Re:What Is Nix?
by myguidingstar on Thursday May 21, 2020 @07:17AM
(#23257043)
nix is the solution. It's totally different from any random packager you've seen. It goes the reversed direction of abstracting dependencies away: it makes dependencies explicit (and reproducible!)
I get it, but my point is that unless it can cope with packages that aren't in the ecosystem, it will just add another variant rather than solving the problem, as per https://xkcd.com/927/
It reminds me a lot of http://www.vestasys.org/
Re:What Is Nix?
by Ericson2314 on Thursday May 21, 2020 @11:50AM
(#23259909)
Nix at this point is almost 20 years old, and we have 10,000s of packages.
If that meme wants you to blame something, it should be Docker.
(First of all, it's younger. There's big tons of effort with Docker and yet nothing is reproducible, and DPKG, APT and all their ilk can't even be deprecated but instead are used awkwardly within the Docker ecosystem.)
* apt
* apt preceded by apt-key add
* wget/curl
* pip & pip3
* git clone
* go get
* npm install
* snap
And that's even though I try to avoid esoteric package managers as much as possible. (For example, there was some package recently where the recommended method was brew for linux, and another that wanted to be installed via conda.
There's just so much stuff out there that insists on using some random packaging system. docker, even though it's a bit flaky, abstracts that away.