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A comment on Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rube Goldberg machine?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rub... by tremon on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:42PM (#34587619)
With Nix or Guix, when a cached binary artifact for a given package is missing, you may not even notice, the fallback to building from source is so transparent.

I consider this to be one of the main drawbacks of these systems -- it assumes that every machine is build-capable. I do not want compilers installed on my production servers (nor would I want my RPi to attempt to rebuild half the world because the package server was down). I'm not sure how Nix handles this, but I'm pretty sure that's not possible with Guix.

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Re:Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rub... by pxc on Monday January 30, 2023 @07:16PM (#34588835)
> it assumes that every machine is build-capable

It doesn't, fortunately. You can tell Nix to rely exclusively on the binary cache, or configure it to have 0 build threads locally and use remote builders.

For a server deployment, many popular choices don't have the server build anything, and in some cases it may not even have any users who are allowed to invoke `nix-*` or anything.

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Re:Ask HN: Why does every package+module system become a Rub... by tazjin on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @04:04AM (#34592938)
To be fair, the whole concept of manually installing individual packages on production servers (especially when they run NixOS!) is a complete anti-pattern, so that situation wouldn't even occur during normal operation.
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