spack VS not-os

> 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

Hi. I'm new to nix and want to ask if you have an idea how to build an ISO image file of not-os and run it on QEMU virt vanager?

Maybe not-os?

oh oops, I think I was intending to type "crowd source" but I really met "crowd fund".

I do want to finish my FreeBSD cross PR, but is is hard. We already have NetBSD working, including building the kernel, so I think it is better to start there.

I opened https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os/issues/16 because I think that would be the absolute easiest first step, with the fewest moving parts. But I don't know how kernels, even Linux, are packaged into bootable thingies at all.

I also found this: https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

It's like an OS that has builtin salt/ansible/chef/puppet.

Because Nix language describe the OS instead of what to change/configure it's superior to these tools, and solves the problem that supposedly same machines are drifting apart.

For example if in the CM you tell it to install a package, then change your mind and remove the entry that does it. The package will remain installed.

With NixOS if you remove the package from configuration, it's gone.

I personally really like Nix's building capability. For example I can use it to generate a minimal docker container. It requires some knowledge, but I can also modify compilation options in dependencies (like remove unneeded functionality).

It looks like there's also an option to similarly build lightweight OS images[1]. I haven't tried it yet but looks cool.

[1] https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

You might want to check out https://github.com/telent/nixwrt and https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os as solutions with similar goals. The former is a promising but yet-unfinished way of using Nix to manage a router, while the latter is a similar way of using Nix to generate an immutable OS image.