Re:A decade of dotfiles
by asiachick on Monday May 30, 2022 @01:12PM
(#31561154)
So, not having heard of Nix, I go to their home page and watch the video. It shows "nix-shell -p nodejs". Hmm, sounds like it's using the apt-get version of node which is usually out of date. It then shows making a shell.nix that enables nodejs and commits it to a repo and suggests sharing it. This completely ignores the fact that my various projects requires specific versions of node. Maybe the first example shouldn't be one that's pretty clearly wrong?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
> sounds like it's using the apt-get version of node which is usually out of date
It’s using the Nixpkgs version, which unfortunately depends on which nixpkgs channel you’re on. There’s a `nodejs_latest` attribute, which is actually latest (18.2.0 right now), as well as `nodejs-12_x` or somesuch for past major versions (where required by other nixpkgs packages). Plain `nodejs` should be the LTS version.
> This completely ignores the fact that my various projects requires specific versions of node
Nix allows you to pin either nixpkgs or a particular package with commit-level granularity. I’m not sure this sort of video is the right place to introduce that.
Notably, with Nix Flakes, everything managed by Nix gets automatically 100% precisely pinned to specific versions by hash.
would have been all that hard for the video to show node-12.x instead of nodejs? I would have clearly shown choosing a version instead of wrongly showing bad unreproducible practices that makes anyone paying attention question if the devs actually get what they're doing