spack VS nixos-generators

> 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

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

Those Linode instructions are about installing an OS from an installation ISO from Linode's rescue mode. -- I'd consider that more a 'plus' to Linode that you get to be able to install whatever unsupported Linux on Linode's VMs. But, of course it's not as smooth as the officially supported images.

Sibling comment mentions that NixOS provides ways to build VM images (e.g. https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators has a generator specifically for Linode).

Another option is to use nixos-infect, which will replace a Linux distribution with a NixOS distribution. https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

> At that point, I feel like all of the repeatability gains are gone. If I want to spin up a fresh server, I have to read a guide and set stuff up by hand?

Just as with ansible, "git pull to deploy". You'd keep a copy of your NixOS configuration.nix somewhere else, and would be able to apply it later.

> it really does let me just get a new VPS and deploy to it very fast

Using a tool you're familiar with to get the job done is going to be faster than learning to use a tool you're unfamiliar with.

I believe much of the use of NixOS is for hobby stuff, and for personal machines. (c.f. "In what environments do you use Nix", Development (1242) vs Home Server (845) vs Production (386) https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983).

If you need to generate lxc container in NixOS then perhaps this repo might be useful: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators this article uses it https://www.thedroneely.com/posts/running-nixos-linux-containers/

You might wanna check out nix-community/nixos-generators, it’s maintained by the same dude as Disko

You can look at nixos-generators for support code that well let you take existing configs and build a variety of bootable images from them.

You should take a look at NixOS Generators, it's a flake with configs to build common formats like ISO, LXC, Docker, etc. I use that to generate an ISO with my config, specifically the packages.iso section.

I am trying to make use of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators to generate qcow2 images from a NixOs configuration. Since it will be used with Scaleway, they require an efi bootable image.

I haven't migrated machines from one vm provider to vmware, but I have provided a number of pregenerated nixos images (along the line of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators) to clients to install onto vmware (and other - hyperv, xen, qemu, physical) hosts.