NixOS Is Not Reproducible

Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by mastertask on Saturday October 26, 2024 @04:57AM (#41953550)

Guile and Nix are horrible languages with shitty syntax, the difference is that one is general purpose (Guile) and the other is a mix of yaml and json, while Guile (Lisp) abuses parentheses and you end up lost in spaghetti code, in Nix you end up not knowing what it's doing even if you're an "expert". They are bad solutions and not very reproducible, because in NixOS you have to change every so often the shitty variables they use to set garbage and in Guix you have to fight if you need non-free software with the NonGuix channel and other kind of nonsense.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by IshKebab on Saturday October 26, 2024 @06:55AM (#41953986)

I agree. I really think Nix would be a lot more approachable if it didn't have such a weird language. The fact that it is dynamically typed and declarative also means it is completely undiscoverable.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by creata on Saturday October 26, 2024 @07:33AM (#41954109)

Those things (parentheses and free software) don't make Guix a bad solution. It's just not for you.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by mastertask on Saturday October 26, 2024 @02:43PM (#41956806)

If Guix were an optimal solution, many companies would be using it, but that's not happening. It's just a niche experiment. And parentheses don't seem so bad when the code is one line, when tens or hundreds of lines won't be so fun.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by anthk on Sunday October 27, 2024 @04:14AM (#41960719)

HPC under Inria. Giving how young Guix is, lots of companies rely on it.

>Tens or hundreds

You never wrote a single line or Scheme or Common Lisp and it shows.

No one writes thousands of nested lines down. They modularize it into functions because Lisp was basically made literally for that.

Get some Emacs modules and code, such as Mastodon.el. Look at the source code. Far easier to understand than any C or C++ codebase, not to mention Rust.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by exe34 on Saturday October 26, 2024 @05:07AM (#41953590)

> you end up not knowing what it's doing even if you're an "expert"

Oh you've tried Haskell then?

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by mastertask on Saturday October 26, 2024 @03:00PM (#41956923)

Well, with Haskell you know what it is oriented towards and you know what to expect, but Nix wants to control everything in the system by adding unnecessary complexity to the simple and making the complex even more complex.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by exe34 on Saturday October 26, 2024 @03:02PM (#41956936)

Sounds like you want MacOS.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by mastertask on Saturday October 26, 2024 @05:02PM (#41957705)

No, I like it practical and without such stupid design choices.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by exe34 on Saturday October 26, 2024 @05:52PM (#41957999)

If only there were alternatives...

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by anthk on Saturday October 26, 2024 @05:04AM (#41953572)

Losing parentheses is not an issue for any Lisp programmer.

I remind you this is HN, guess on what was built on.

>non-free software

Non-free software should be the issue, not Guix itself.

Not free software by default is NOT reproducible. Period. Useless for science.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by poincaredisk on Saturday October 26, 2024 @06:38AM (#41953933)

>Non-free software should be the issue, not Guix itself

Not the parent, but this approach from Guix maintainers is the reason why it's not an OS I would consider. I use free software almost exclusively, but I appreciate that nixos doesn't try to play the moral police and will let me easily run any non-free software I want. I don't like it, but sometimes using a non free tool is the easiest way to get the job done, and life is too short to get stuck on software idealism (at least for me).

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by opan on Saturday October 26, 2024 @08:28AM (#41954345)

You are free to use non-free software on Guix System, it's just not in the main channel or officially recommended. You'd likely figure it out fast enough if you wanted.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by agubelu on Saturday October 26, 2024 @06:22AM (#41953856)

The reproducibility crisis in science has nothing to do with the supporting software itself not being reproducible.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by anthk on Saturday October 26, 2024 @06:31AM (#41953905)

Both are needed. Look what happened with Excel in genomics. Once you can control every point of the pipeline, you are set. That means a discrete set of versions, dependencies and being able to rebuild and fix every point of software if bugs show up.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by viraptor on Saturday October 26, 2024 @08:41AM (#41954405)

> Not free software by default is NOT reproducible.

Changing a licence on some software doesn't change the compilation. The licence is completely orthogonal to whether software is reproducible or not.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by anthk on Saturday October 26, 2024 @09:24AM (#41954595)

How do I recompile binary blobs?

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by kazinator on Saturday October 26, 2024 @09:59AM (#41954759)

You don't. So the blob that is packaged and installed is identical to the one in the repository. Hence, it has no reproducibility issue.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by viraptor on Saturday October 26, 2024 @09:42AM (#41954677)

Non-free does not mean compiled. Here's a non-free script which I grant you the right to view but not execute or copy:

    echo foobar

Reproducible, compiled and free are all orthogonal.

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Re:NixOS Is Not Reproducible by prmoustache on Saturday October 26, 2024 @12:13PM (#41955673)

Isn't most non-free stuff installed in /opt or in the user homedir these days anyway?

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