News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The Curse of NixOS. Parent comment

Re:The Curse of NixOS by tazjin on Monday January 24, 2022 @09:47AM (#30058204)
There's nothing there that needs flakes (an experimental feature which people should not enable without understanding the implications). You could build a system derivation and run a diff against /run/current-system on it.

For what it's worth, nix-diff has very verbose output (it literally diffs everything that is different in the inputs & outputs). A slightly nicer way to diff systems is nvd[0] (example output[1]) which only shows version changes and added/removed packages.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/khumba/nvd

[1]: https://deploys.tvl.fyi/diff/4xmyvkr9nw0cwkn5q38p0cfc58x3jdy...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Curse of NixOS by flurie on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:55AM (#30059181)
Flakes are "experimental" in the sense that gmail was in "beta" for however many years. I feel like it's important to mention that you're attempting to rewrite nix[1] and explicitly ignoring flakes[2]. Many people using nix are coming to the conclusion that flakes make things much easier to use and understand, and they obviate the need for a lot of secondary tooling that has become standard. There's an easy way to gauge support for flakes: look at how many high-profile nix repos have an up-to-date flakes.nix file.

[1] https://tvl.fyi/blog/rewriting-nix

[2] https://lobste.rs/s/ypwgwp/tvix_we_are_rewriting_nix#c_zvtze...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Curse of NixOS by remexre on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:05AM (#30058471)
> experimental

Haven't flakes been non-experimental since 2.4?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The Curse of NixOS by nitsky on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:17AM (#30058630)
No, using flakes still requires enabling the “experimental feature”. The difference in 2.4 is that you no longer need to use a prerelease version of Nix to have the experimental feature available.
[ Parent | on HN ]