niv VS leksah

niv

Flakes work. An alternative is niv which was once popular and provides a good developer experience.

Essentially you can just think of it as a standardized default.nix/shell.nix with built-in Niv integration.

I agree that the FP part is not the only issue. It's that the community feels a bit more academic/I'll fix this for myself in the way that works best for me.

You can indeed achieve some reproducibility with Docker. It's tricky though, as you'd have to pin exact package versions of software. If you'd `FROM ubuntu:$VERION`, and would run an `apt-get update`, you're not guaranteed to get the same software.

Nix is like ZFS, as that it breaks the wall between two previously distinct area's. Those being building software, and installing/configuration software on your OS. It's quite different from the snapshot-everything methodology that Docker uses. Yeah, one can split in multi-stage images etc, but than you'll be keeping track of which dependencies need to be moved between the stages yourself, in a manner that cannot be abstracted away, so you're doomed to repeat the same patterns over and over again.

People also state that LVM + ext3 is more than sufficient compared to the complexity of ZFS. They miss out on the fact on how much more fine grained solutions are possible with ZFS.

I've used niv [0] before flakes arrived, and am actually still using that instead of flakes. The experimental nature of them has scared me away from them, as I'm not daily involved in this ecosystem at the moment.

[0] https://github.com/nmattia/niv#niv

You can use something like Niv to manage additional sources. I use it to fetch some Emacs packages, for example ligature.el. Then you update the package using $ niv update.

One thing that made this easier was switching from using Nix channels to explicitly pinning my dependencies with Niv. I honestly never fully understood how channels worked, and it's just much nicer to have everything specified in my Git repo. The exact commit of Nixpkgs that I'm using is in my sources.json file, so "reverting" just means checking out an older commit of my configs from Git then running nixos-rebuild switch. If I were redoing my dotfiles today I'd probably use Nix Flakes rather than Niv, but I suspect that Niv is still an easier option to get started with.

Does someone know of a way to remove unused pinned packages via [niv](https://github.com/nmattia/niv)?

Pin nixpkgs, and version control it. If you're using flakes, then just version control the flake.lock alongside your configuration. If you're not using flakes, you can use niv to easily pin nipxkgs, at the expense of some boiler plate.

This... This is laughable. How do I install ruby 2.6.8? Oh, there's no ruby_2_6_8, because of course there isn't. And this could be difference between a secure system and all your base are belong to us.

And they call this reproducible builds?

And that's before getting into the ridiculous

--- start quote ---

All the software that we installed depends on the specific version of the nixpkgs channel that we installed on our system [whose only version is a commit hash in a git repo]

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So you need an extra tool [2] for, quote, "painless dependencies for Nix projects."

Yes, sure. I'm definitely ditching my version managers in favor of this tool, that hasn't solved these issues in 18 years of its existence.

[1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=21.05&from=0&size=...

[2] https://github.com/nmattia/niv

[2]: https://github.com/leksah/leksah

Well, Leksah used to be a good experience in regards to debugging.

https://github.com/leksah/leksah

There is already an Haskell IDE written in haskell : Leksah

There are Nix based installation instructions for Mac and Linux. (Getting familiar with Nix can help with managing the Haskell package and tools ecosystem more generally – so it's good Yak shaving...).