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Nix Derivation Madness

(fzakaria.com)
184 points birdculture | 4 comments | 31 Oct 25 14:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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amelius ◴[31 Oct 25 17:52 UTC] No.45774752[source]▶
> The road to Nix enlightenment is no joke and full of dragons.

Nix was a great research project. Now is the time to rewrite it from the ground up.

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jbstack ◴[31 Oct 25 18:09 UTC] No.45774922[source]▶
Well, there's Guix as an alternative if you want a similar concept but different implementation philosophy. For me the major disadvantage of Guix is lack of package availability compared to Nix.
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1. amelius ◴[31 Oct 25 18:10 UTC] No.45774938[source]▶
Isn't there a way to transpile the scripts from Nix to Guix?
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2. Y_Y ◴[31 Oct 25 20:26 UTC] No.45776335[source]▶
It's not to hard to translate manually, but since the dependency tree is massive it doesn't seem feasible to do wholesale.
3. c0balt ◴[01 Nov 25 02:08 UTC] No.45778708[source]▶
That would be possible. The main problem there is that nixpkgs, the package repository one would want to translate, uses a good chunk of specialized build infrastructure (parts in nix, some in rust/Perl/Python) that is designed for nix (the package manger).

Some other semi-specific parts, like stdenv bootstrapping, are also a bit more complex than just some nix build instructions.

4. brendyn ◴[01 Nov 25 03:08 UTC] No.45778936[source]▶
In practicing no because in the end it generally takes a human intelligence to fully understand the requirements of a particular program, sanity check everything, get the right dependency versions and fix build errors. For code library repositories like rust, importing is fairy automated since everything is neat, tidy, and regular. But end user applications are more often than not a pain in the ass