FUZIX VS nixpkgs

Alan Cox has a "Fuzix" repo, that puts together Uzix variants for the Z80.

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

Fuzix does appear to have CPU support for 6800 and is probably your best starting location. Although based on what I've seen of the ET-3400 you could be in for quite the uphill struggle.

Software complexity also helps to establish or maintain the predominance of large corporations on the market. In contrast, a simple software system can be reimplemented by a small team or even a single person, so there is more competition. This is not only demonstrated by Wirth's systems, but also by several 7th edition Unix clones of the 80's [1-4] as well as current ones [5] and also reimplementations of the classic MacOS [6].

Back in the 1980s, operating systems and compilers were often seen as the most complex pieces of software. Nowadays, web browsers include (and reimplement) large parts of an OS and compiler and are probably even more complex than a current OS such as Linux or a current compiler such as clang/LLVM. Only rich (or well funded) companies such as Google, Apple and the Mozilla foundation can afford to build a browser today that can be used to access current web pages.

So a central question is if we can turn back times and make software more simple again. Maybe this ship has already sailed - but it can't hurt to try. From experience with my students, it is extremely satisfying for them to build a complete system from scratch instead of mostly copying and pasting library calls or StackOverflow code snippets. Thus, I try to enable my students to experience this sense of achievement. They will probably never get the chance to do something similar in their later career in industry.

[1] One Man Unix for 68k - http://www.pix.net/mirrored/discordia.org.uk/~steve/omu.html

[2] Uzix for Z80 (link to the MSX port) - http://uzix.sourceforge.net

[3] Coherent Unix - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

[4] Minix - https://www.minix3.org

[5] Alan Cox' Fuzix - https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

[6] Ardi Executor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)

How about FUZIX? It might be a better fit for vintage computers?

https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

Also fuzix: https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

I don't think so. The article is probably intended for the Nix community, so the author doesn't need to convince HN that something is going on. If as an outsider you are interested then you need to look into it yourself, the community has no obligation to make their internal conflicts legible to the outside world.

As an outsider myself, it certainly looks like something is going on as more than 20 Nixpkg maintainers left in a week: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=label%3A%228.has%3...

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset

I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors

For a single file script, nix can make the package management quite easy: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-f...

For example,

```

Yes, Nix doesn't actually ensure that the builds are deterministic. In fact it works just fine if they aren't. There are packages in nixpkgs that aren't reproducible: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...

I'm not familiar with Bazel, but Nix in it's current form wouldn't have solved this attack. First of all, the standard mkDerivation function calls the same configure; make; make install process that made this attack possible. Nixpkgs regularly pulls in external resources (fetchUrl and friends) that are equally vulnerable to a poisoned release tarball. Checkout the comment on the current xz entry in nixpkgs https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/comp...

NixOS uses a monorepo and I think everyone's love it.

I love being able to easily grep through all the packages source code and there's regularly PRs that harmonizes conventions across many packages.

Nixpkgs doesn't include the packaged software source code, so it's a lot more practical than what Debian is doing.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

In this specific case, nix uses fetchFromGitHub to download the source archive, which are generated by GitHub for the specified revision[1]. Arch seems to just download the tarball from the releases page[2].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/3c2fdd0a4e6396fc310a6e...

[2]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/ib...