this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
87 points (93.1% liked)
Programming
17668 readers
151 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nix is indeed cool. I just see it as less practical than maintaining a toolchain for devs to use. Seems like reinventing the wheel, instead of airing-up the tires. I could well be absolutely wrong there - my experience is mainly enterprise software and not every process or tool there is used because it is the best one.
@nickwitha_k @uthredii I’d like to think a better analogy would be that nix is like using a 3D model of a wheel instead of a compass and a straightedge to make wheels hehe 🙃
I quite like the sound of Nix, every time I touch on it but haven't really dug in yet. You're making me really want to though.
There are definately some things preventing Nix adoption. What are the reasons you see it as less practical than the alternatives?
What are alternative ways of maintaining a toolchain that achieves the same thing?
I see it as less practical mainly due to the extant tooling and age/maturity of the project.
The ways that I'm most familiar with are use of software like Artifactory - basically a multi-repo. Using such a tool, any package or artifact can be readily retained for future use. Then, for builds, one only needs to ensure that it is used as the package source, regardless of type (PyPy, Docker image, binary, RPM, etc).
Alternatively, one can use individual repos for any relevant package type but that's a bit more overhead to manage.