niv
nixpkgs
Our great sponsors
niv | nixpkgs | |
---|---|---|
16 | 973 | |
1,456 | 15,656 | |
- | 5.3% | |
6.3 | 10.0 | |
about 2 months ago | 1 day ago | |
Haskell | Nix | |
MIT License | MIT License |
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.
niv
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NixOS + Haskell best practices circa March 2023
niv
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Pulling themes from a git project: the nix way?
Flakes work. An alternative is niv which was once popular and provides a good developer experience.
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What are the biggest Pain Points with NIX? And what makes it worth the pain?
Essentially you can just think of it as a standardized default.nix/shell.nix with built-in Niv integration.
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Our Roadmap for Nix
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
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Simplest way to set up neovim
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.
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Unstable vs Stable channels
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.
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Remove unused niv packages
Does someone know of a way to remove unused pinned packages via [niv](https://github.com/nmattia/niv)?
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How to downgrade single package?
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.
- Compiling emacs is killing me
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Ditch Your Version Manager
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]
--- end quote ---
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
nixpkgs
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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...
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GitHub Disabled the Xz Repo
True, but irrelevant -- _some packages_, _somewhere_, do depend on xz, which, if built, requires pulling the source from GitHub (see the default.nix: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-23.11/pkgs/tools...)
It's not the vulnerability that's a problem right now (NixOS was protected by a couple of factors) but rather GitHub's hamfisted response.
That is the problem.
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Combining Nix with Terraform for better DevOps
We’ve noticed that some users have been asking about how to use older versions of Terraform in their Nix setups [1, 2]. This is an example of the diverse needs of people and the importance of maintaining backward compatibility. We hope that nixpkgs-terraform will be a useful tool for these users.
What are some alternatives?
leksah - Haskell IDE
asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more
update-nix-fetchgit - A program to automatically update fetchgit values in Nix expressions
Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]
ghcid - Very low feature GHCi based IDE
git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files
elm-make
easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications
hpc-threshold - Small utility for validating whether HPC result is above defined thresholds
spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
ihaskell - A Haskell kernel for the Jupyter project.
waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.