NixCon Live

https://2020.nixcon.org/live.html

by FRidh • 6 years ago

148 48 6 years ago

2020.nixcon.org

ghuntley• 6 years ago

Jump in chat at https://www.irccloud.com/irc/freenode.net/channel/nixcon

YouTube link at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sQa04olUA0

nikivi3• 6 years ago

I hope Nix takes off for one reason. I don't want people to do same builds again and again especially for Rust it's painful.

I want to install binaries with cargo instead of doing the same build again and again. Similar to https://cachix.org

I don't honestly know why that isn't the case yet, perhaps storing binaries takes too much storage that Mozilla doesn't have money for. Or perhaps it can't do guarantees like the ones Nix gives to allow binaries being shared of builds.

This is the main reason that makes interfacing with Rust as a plain user a pain.

zhenyavinogrdov• 6 years ago

The situation for installing haskell programs with nix is great, practically everything from hackage is available in the binary cache.

nikivi3• 6 years ago

Is this harder to achieve for the Rust ecosystem (due to some properties of Haskell perhaps)? Or just no one put in the effort in doing it?

Is it expensive to maintain all the binaries for all of Hackage?

wtetzner4• 6 years ago

I think another good reason is that it lets you specify language-agnostic dependencies, including build tools etc. If Nix really takes off, we can stop dealing with language-specific package managers.

pjmlp• 6 years ago

I don't need nix for C and C++, and several other compiled languages.

What is missing is cargo support for native libraries.

soraminazuki2• 6 years ago

I find Nix incredibly useful for C and C++ development, though. It allows me to get a working development environment (including completion support) for any major open source C/C++ project by simply placing a default.nix or shell.nix file with the following content and running nix-shell:

    (import <nixpkgs> {}).your-favorite-project

domenkozar• 6 years ago

Next talk starts at 15 UTC, that is in 2 hours.

I'll be speaking how about how to get Nix to become mainstream.

tome• 6 years ago

Oh, that's good to know because cfp.nixcon.org says 15:00 but without timezone, so I assumed it was 15:00 in my timezone!

https://cfp.nixcon.org/nixcon2020/schedule/

nbathum2• 6 years ago

Yes, blame me for this one. I didn't have things ready quickly enough to fix certain important user experience aspects like "showing the timezone".... which is kind of a basic and critical need.

Anyways, the widget at https://2020.nixcon.org/#program localizes to your timezone (but also shows weird dates sometimes).

Times from the cfp subdomain are all in UTC.

moocowtruck• 6 years ago

nix work on windows natively yet?

exdsq2• 6 years ago

No, bane of my life. It’s glitchy even with WSL2.

anka-213• 6 years ago

What problems have you had in WSL2?

adkadskhj• 6 years ago

What specifically? And are we talking, Nix or NixOS in WSL2?

est314• 6 years ago

I've been using Nix OS since this year and am mostly happy with it, but if I had to name my largest issue with it then it's that updates are so traffic intensive. Basically, glibc is linked dynamically on most distros, including Nix OS. But if there is a glibc update that only changes the .so file, it still updates all packages depending on glibc.

A more expansive list of my issues with nix (with some curse words :p): https://gist.github.com/est31/005f17628d55fda27b401d3c994233...

arianvanp• 6 years ago

I'm confused with your first point?

No concept of source packages. There is only a binary cache (hydra) and the derivations in nixpkgs.

NixOS _Only_ has a concept of source packages. The cache is a (sound) optimisation om top of it. just disable the binary cache and you can build all packages from source.

the_duke3• 6 years ago

Nix packages don't contain any source code.

The package definition describes how to fetch the source code from a source (like a Git repo or a hosted archive) and build it. The built result only contains what is necessary at runtime.

A sizeable amount of packages don't even fetch source code but a prebuilt binary which is then fixed up to work with Nix.

There is a source cache, but it is optional.

As an example, check out ripgrep [1]. It uses `fetchFromGithub` to retrieve the code.

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3bb54189b0c8132752fff3...

wtetzner4• 6 years ago

To watch the stream from VLC on your computer, run:
nix-shell --packages vlc --run "vlc https://dash.nixcon.net/dash/master.m3u8"

I thought this was pretty cool, but unfortunately, this doesn't work on macOS...

abathur• 6 years ago

Won't really save you today, but you should be able to replace vlc with mpv; I'm currently viewing the presentations from macOS in this manner.

wtetzner4• 6 years ago

Thanks! This worked:

    nix-shell --packages mpv --run "mpv https://dash.nixcon.net/dash/master.m3u8"

DenseComet• 6 years ago

That command temporarily installs vlc and launches vlc from the command line. If you already have vlc installed, you can do "vlc https://dash.nixcon.net/dash/master.m3u8"

wtetzner4• 6 years ago

Yes, I know. nix-shell on macOS works fine for me, but vlc fails to install because the Nix package is not supported on macOS.

I was just sad that I couldn't use the cool Nix magic to view the stream.

the_duke3• 6 years ago

It's important to note that Nix(OS) is really 3 things:

A functional language, a package manager and an operating system.

I switched all my desktops and laptops to NixOS at the beginning of the year, and I'm starting to use introduce it at multiple companies for data science / ML work environments with full reproducibility and Kubernetes bare metal deployments.

Main benefits:

* pure build system

* extremely easy way to set up and switch between custom environments with their own sets of dependencies (nix-env, nix-shell)

* nix (the package manager) is cross-platform and works on MacOS and other Linux distros (although that's not always smooth sailing...)

* Ephemeral environments that are quickly set up and torn down, like the `nix-shell --packages vlc --run "vlc https://dash.nixcon.net/dash/master.m3u8"`

* (mostly) fully reproducible OS and user environments

* patching and/or locally building dependencies without ending up with a messy system

I can now finally get a (almost) 100% reproducible user environment including hardware configuration (kernel modules, disks, ...), installed packages, configurations, ...

home-manager [1] even enables declarative configuration of things like VS Code/Vim/Firefox plugins, and provides statically typed configuration options for many applications. The package repo is also very comprehensive.

For manually managed servers that aren't just bootstrapped from VM/cloud images the benefits are also wonderful.

It's definitely not all smooth sailing though:

* There is documentation, but it's spread across a lot of pages, disorganized and sometimes quite outdated or incomplete. I often have to read the source code - which is also mostly undocumented.

* Running unpackaged software: you can't just download binary releases and run them, unless they are fully statically linked (like most Go binaries). Instead you either have to whip up a package definition, or manually try to get the binary working (eg with patchelf)

* The language is somewhat quirky. As often the case with such niche languages, documentation and tooling are very subpar and debugging is not exactly a joy. I wish Nix was built on a more common language with good tooling around it. I bet it would be quite a bit more popular, due to the lower barrier of entry. You get used to it though if you are willing to put in some effort.

* Package ecosystem: the package repo is really comprehensive, but maintainership for some less popular ones is not up to Arch + AUR levels. Also the auditing for a lot of the packages is very limited. For any security critical environments or server deployments I would definitely limit myself to a hand full of core packages and/or be prepared for manual auditing. I wish the repo was split up more like Arch into core and community, with different guarantees for auditing and maintenance. (the Flakes effort will hopefully help here quite a bit)

All in all Nix is great though, and it's impressive how stable and featureful the ecosystem has become, despite being somewhat of a niche "product".

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

X6S1x6Okd1st• 6 years ago

I've been using it on my main computer for about 6 months now.

It's been the steepest learning curve, but yeilded the biggest dividends so far.

The other day I needed to install some software from a specific 3 year old branch. Copying the default.nix for the up to date version and changing a few of the options got it up and running with minimal fuss.

There are certainly some rough edges around usability, but the fundamental value prop is immense.

Also just using nix as a secondary package manager on mac or some other Linux distro is great, I'd expect shell.nix to start showing up in an increasing amount of OSS projects. It showed up in hashicorp's latest project

JamesSwift• 6 years ago

Nix (specifically nix package manager on MacOS) sits in a weird spot where it is absolutely indispensable for me personally but I am absolutely hesitant to recommend it to others without extreme caveats. I really wish the UX of it were much better, which ideally then would lead to higher adoption and less frequent 'osx-isms'.

aszen• 6 years ago

Been using nix package manager on Ubuntu, so far the experience has been mixed, while the package management and nixpkgs is great but the tooling and documentation around the nix language are lacking.

It's one of those tools that are technically miles ahead of their competitors but struggle to gain traction because of beginners facing little cuts and bruises in using them.

That's why I'm interested in the Nix Modules proposal to be presented in the conference that aims to bring better usability to the language with types and docs.

Also the updated website is a lot easier to navigate now and explains the use cases of nix quite well

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