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Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: a guide to using Nix flakes the non-flake way (jade.fyi)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/nix

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[–] parens 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Flakes are optional

I think the bigger point is that they are experimental. Who wants to go into production with experimental stuff? Unfortunately, if my employer were to read a suggestion of using experimental stuff in production, it would be immediately rejected.
nix itself, however, has been getting some people interested at work and if things go well, might be integrated into production solutions we sell to customers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They really should be moved out of that category soon. They've been so fully embraced and used by the community that they're effectively standard now.

[–] parens 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The article clearly states otherwise

Flakes also are a symptom or cause of much intra-community strife between "pro-flakes" and "anti-flakes" factions

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Oh, that's easy -- that's utter bullshit. Article is generous, this is a blog post.

[–] parens 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

😂 why do you believe that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because I'm pretty active in the Nix community and have never seen a single anti-flakes comment anywhere. Plenty of people advocating for flakes, and those who don't use or understand flakes. But never anyone who actively dislikes them.

[–] parens -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

OK, I see where you're coming from. You're interpreting "anti" as "dislike". Have you considered interpreting it as those who don't use and don't want to use flakes?

Just because there is disagreement, doesn't mean that it has to be tied to negative emotions like hate or dislike.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Well no, because that's not what "anti" means.

And one can absolutely use NixOS without using flakes, whether they're marked experimental or not. They're simply a way to make inputs declarative, rather than the nix-channel method which is imperative.

So there's no "disagreement" here either.

[–] Corbin 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It must be nice to have never productionized a prototype; meanwhile, in the land of startups, putting experiments into production is standard operating procedure, despite being a bad idea.

The more important part is that flakes are unstable. The concept is solid and clearly works at scale, but the precise API available to users is not yet finalized or versioned.

[–] parens 2 points 10 months ago

It must be nice to have never productionized a prototype; meanwhile, in the land of startups, putting experiments into production is standard operating procedure, despite being a bad idea.

You're making assumptions. I worked in startups that did took great care not to beta software or libs. We were in production and changing stuff all the time - multiple times a day, but that was one of the rules. When you work with time-sensitive, always on environments with world-wide customers, bringing down production for multiple hours could mean the end your company in those early stages.
Maybe I was extra-ordinarily lucky with the startups I was in.

Just because other startups do it, doesn't mean that it has to be done.