spack VS Home Manager using Nix

> Are we talking about the same autotools?

Yes. Instead of figuring out how to do something particular with every single software package, I can do a --with-foo or --without-bar or --prefix=/opt/baz-1.2.3, and be fairly confident that it will work the way I want.

Certainly with package managers or (FreeBSD) Ports a lot is taken care of behind the scenes, but the above would also help the package/port maintainers as well. Lately I've been using Spack for special-needs compiles, but maintainer ease also helps there, but there are still cases one a 'fully manual' compile is still done.

> Suffice it to say, I prefer to work with handwritten makefiles.

Having everyone 'roll their own' system would probably be worse, because any "mysteriously failure" then has to be debugged specially for each project.

Have you tried Spack?

* https://spack.io

* https://spack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Well, good luck with that, cause it's broken.

Previous release miscompiled Python [1]

Current release miscompiles bison [2]

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/38724

[2] https://github.com/spack/spack/issues/37172#issuecomment-181...

gh is available via Homebrew, MacPorts, Conda, Spack, Webi, and as a…

> I can't count the number of times I've seen people say "md5 is fine for use case xyz" where in some counterintuitive way it wasn't fine.

I can count many more times that people told me that md5 was "broken" for file verification when, in fact, it never has been.

My main gripe with the article is that it portrays the entire legal profession as "backwards" and "deeply negligent" when they're not actually doing anything unsafe -- or even likely to be unsafe. And "tech" knows better. Much of tech, it would seem, has no idea about the use cases and why one might be safe or not. They just know something's "broken" -- so, clearly, we should update.

> Just use a safe one, even if you think you "don't need it".

Here's me switching 5,700 or so hashes from md5 to sha256 in 2019: https://github.com/spack/spack/pull/13185

Did I need it? No. Am I "compliant"? Yes.

Really, though, the main tangible benefit was that it saved me having to respond to questions and uninformed criticism from people unnecessarily worried about md5 checksums.

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/blob/develop/var/spack/repos/...

In Spack [1] we can express all these constraints for the dependency solver, and we also try to always re-cythonize sources. The latter is because bundled cythonized files are sometimes forward incompatible with Python, so it's better to just regenerate those with an up to date cython.

[1] https://github.com/spack/spack/

You want to look at the tools used for HPC systems, these are generally very well tried and tested and can be setup for single machine usage. Remote access - we use ssh, but web interfaces such as Open On Demand exist - https://openondemand.org/. For managing Jobs, Slurm is currently the most popular option - https://slurm.schedmd.com/documentation.html. For a module system (to load software and libraries per user), Spack is a great - https://spack.io/. You might also want to consider containerisation options, https://apptainer.org/ is a good option.

git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git ./spack/bin/spack install gcc

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.