supervisor VS nixpkgs

I recently discovered the home-assistant supervisor [0] repository. It's awesome to see such a well-designed, mature, and actively maintained open-source python application. I've found that there's no shortage of high quality python libraries and frameworks to learn from, but open-source applications aren't as common. I love coming across repos like this so I can study their design.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor

Nice to see HA getting some love on HN. A colleague recommended it to me about 3 years ago as an alternative to Domoticz. I've migrated back than and haven't looked back since. I consider myself a real Home Assistant enthousiast. I've contributed some small amounts to the project, created and maintain my own add-ons and love to share my configuration with others.

Although most of the things currently just work, especially with the (migrated) UI integrations. Some things still feel very unfinished, like blueprints. Which was a terrific idea, but maintaining and keeping those up to date is an absolute nightmare and you will have to that yourself [1]. Same with battery powered devices. When they work, it's all great, but having to watch their battery level is just a hassle. You can create your own automation to do that for you, but it seems unnecessary.

For me the community also sometimes feels very hostile. For instance, you can have a Portainer add-on, but installing other Docker images makes your system 'unsupported'. Same with some blacklisted images [2], which break Home Assistant Supervisor. Or when the maintainer of one of the add-ons completely ignores a breaking issue after a day [3].

1. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/reload-automations-aut...

2. https://github.com/home-assistant/supervisor/blob/main/super...

3. https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-adguard-home/issues/1...

I've also tried giving the container access to real dev by following the suggestion mentioned here (followed by a supervisor reload/restart from the UI), but that also doesn't always work and gets overwritten with the next supervisor silent update.

Would you consider a comment on one of the open| issues so they can see it's a biggish problem? Might save someone else some precious time.

I wouldn’t hold my breath on it being changed, based on the GitHub issue about it.

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...