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Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions

(tazj.in)
194 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 15 Jul 25 08:11 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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pkulak ◴[18 Jul 25 19:04 UTC] No.44608573[source]▶
> why flakes are nonsense

Oh wow, I want to hear more about that. I love flakes, but I've known they are controversial, and never really heard why.

replies(4): >>44608706 #>>44609717 #>>44609726 #>>44612089 #
1. hamandcheese ◴[18 Jul 25 20:53 UTC] No.44609717[source]▶
- flakes perform very poorly in large repos. This might be changing soon with lazy-trees, but I've been waiting for that for 2+ years.

- flake inputs are not fetched lazily.

- flakes are somewhat restrictive in that you can't override an input with an arbitrary value. This matters if you want to pass in, say, a specially configured nixpkgs object. In practice, for non trivial use cases, flakes fail to solve the problem they set out to solve. Most flakes expose lib functions for these advanced use cases but that's pretty much equivalent to what you get with non-flakes.