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MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

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2031 points jrk | 3 comments | 22 May 20 15:39 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 17:36 UTC] No.23274749[source]▶
Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading.

As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users. This is too bad, since apart from Nix being a nice package manager, it also provides a sane binary package for Emacs. The Homebrew core/cask versions only provides a limited feature set[2][3].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925

[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510

[3]: https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/search?q=support+is%...

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glofish ◴[22 May 20 18:03 UTC] No.23275063[source]▶
IMHO the original choice of the path seems incredibly ill-advised and the main burden lies with the original developers.

sometimes old errors and mistakes come back and bite

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soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 18:09 UTC] No.23275118[source]▶
It only seems that way now because some platforms have begun locking down their root directories. Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.
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danudey ◴[22 May 20 18:21 UTC] No.23275246[source]▶
> Nix, by design, doesn't conform to the FHS way of organizing directories so it made perfect sense to use /nix when the decision was originally made.

Refusing to conform to the FHS doesn't mean their decision made sense; refusing to conform to the FHS means they made a bad decision in the past and everything progressed from there.

It doesn't 'seem that way now because some platforms have begun locking down their root directories'; it seems that way because creating arbitrary directories in / is a terrible idea, and has been at least since I started using UNIX/Linux systems in the 90's.

Fact is, they made a bad design choice, and now it's come back to bite them (and their users) in the ass.

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soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 18:50 UTC] No.23275532[source]▶
Not conforming to the FHS is what makes Nix possible. You won't get Nix's reproducibility without it.
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mixedCase ◴[22 May 20 18:58 UTC] No.23275625{3}[source]▶
I'm probably missing something, and please let me know if so and why, but it sounds like a chroot could solve path reproducibility.
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1. soraminazuki ◴[22 May 20 19:25 UTC] No.23275911{4}[source]▶
Nix requires that each package only writes to a dedicated directory in /nix/store. For example, files for Firefox 33.1 package would go into /nix/store/b6gvzjyb2pg0kjfwrjmg1vfhh54ad73z-firefox-33.1. By not dumping files from every package in a common directory such as /usr, it requires each package to be explicit with its dependencies. This allows for many nice things explained elsewhere (e.g., https://nixos.org/nix/).
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2. cauthon ◴[22 May 20 20:01 UTC] No.23276285[source]▶
I still don't understand why that can't be solved by putting everything in /opt/nix/store
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3. soraminazuki ◴[23 May 20 14:25 UTC] No.23283179[source]▶
You've got to keep it mind that Nix was designed as a system package manager and its primary target is NixOS. As such, I'd imagine that it wasn't all that unreasonable for Nix to assume ownership over /nix when the decision was made back then. Since Nix doesn't organize files according to FHS recommendations, it's never going to be FHS compliant. If so, what benefits would there be for Nix to choose /opt/nix over /nix? After all, /opt is where third-party packages reside and hardly the right choice anyways.

The fact that Nix can be used as a third-party package manager outside of NixOS was a nice side-effect of its design choices. If Nix was designed from the start as a third-party package manager, it might have placed itself in /opt/nix. However, Nix was made years before some platforms started to lock down the root directory. It worked perfectly well with /nix before this happened.

So instead of asking why Nix is placing itself in /nix instead of following some guidelines for traditional unix distributions, I think we should be asking why platforms are disallowing this. If a platform is going to make this big a breaking change, it'd better have a very good reason to do so. I fail to see the reason beside subjective aesthetics.