Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
nix
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Devbox 0.2.0: Automatic Nix Installer, Plugins, and Background Services
Thinking about it like rpm/deb is where you're getting hung up. Think of it more along the lines of npm, but for your OS (or just your profile in the case of nixpkgs+home-manager).
At the most trivial level, you can set up some packages to install [1][2]. You'll generally come out ahead of classical package managers if you do that and nothing else.
Nix also acknowledges the configuration issue. Think of this like copying some config files using a dockerfile. You can either use literals[3], or use the nix language to generate the config [4] (provided that someone has created the required projection from nix to config).
What this ends up becoming is a single git repo with your entire system setup. My repo gets a bit fancier: I have my home desktop (currently Nixos, but it distrohops a lot), my personal laptop running Ubuntu+intune+nixpkgs for work, and then my work Mac machine (which I am aiming to get rid of). The single repo contains nix configs for all 3, and shares config where appropriate.
I really need to write a blog post about Nix in 2023. The main issue with getting started right now is that the installer requires some convincing to use flakes (not to mention that flakes are disabled by default), and you really should be using flakes.
[1]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/system/jono-d...
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About using Nix in my development workflow
Using these with home-manager is also really simple. You simply enable nix-direnv[0], and then `use flake` in your envrc[1]. Finally, set up your flake.nix with a dev shell[2] (I'm definitely going to take a look at numtide's devshell).
You'll also need flakes and the nix command enabled first [4] (add that line to `/etc/nix/nix.conf` if you aren't using nixos).
Why use flakes? Mostly because it has a lockfile: there's a really good chance that "works on my machine" is "works on my team's machines." Flakes are also much cleaner than vanilla Nix.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.... [1]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/.envrc#L3 [2]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/flake.nix#L65 [4]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/70844981d5cd63c839...
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How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
The nice thing with flake-based NixOS is that it's trivial to cherry-pick unstable onto a stable base. I do a bunch of that in my nixconfigs: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix
nixpkgs
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Nix: The Breaking Point
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...
- Maintainers Leaving
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Air Force picks Anduril, General Atomics to develop unmanned fighter jets
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commits?author=neon-sunset
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Eelco Dolstra's leadership is corrosive to the Nix project
I see two signers in the top 6 displayed on https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/graphs/contributors
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3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup
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,
```
- NixOS/nixpkgs: There isn't a clear canonical way to refer to a specific package
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NixOS Is Not Reproducible
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...
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The xz attack shell script
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...
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Debian Git Monorepo
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
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From xz to ibus: more questionable tarballs
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...
What are some alternatives?
NixOS-WSL - NixOS on WSL(2) [maintainer=@nzbr]
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
bitte - Nix Ops for Terraform, Consul, Vault, Nomad
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.
nixos - My NixOS Configurations
youtube-dl-gui - A cross-platform GUI for youtube-dl made in Electron and node.js
devshell - Per project developer environments
Emu68 - M68K emulation for AArch64/AArch32