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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @TonyGiorgio 9 Feb \ on: Nix Office Hours NixOS
What are your opinions on flakes? Every now and then I run into an OG that hates them but that's all I know going in and I find out useful. I have some general stuff in home manager but other than that I've been enjoying rust projects in nix flakes.
Though I've been quite annoyed at first with what feels like 8+ different rust overlays and I've ended up with what I believe is just the basic old original one when it comes to needing nighty, wasm, etc.
yea, i'm not sure i have the whole picture but here's the tradeoff:
- flakes are very cool in the sense that they're more generic than just throwing a nix expression with source code. They're really another layer that builds on top of Git, where you commit the build configuration with the source code. So any project with a flake can be discovered via Nix without the user/caller relying on nixpkgs. And then you can compose flakes from different projects as you see fit.
- Flakes are a step away from the nixpkgs model which is more about "running a package management repo" . In Nixpkgs, I don't have to care about which version of nixpkgs i'm running, the packages will compose together nicely. That's what nixpkgs guarantees! With flakes you have to be careful not to pull in diff versions of nixpkgs etc. So non-flakes world is more about creating a monolithic set of package recipes that are guaranteed to work now and at any point into the future. This article goes into this a bit.
I get that it's super annoying to be faced with two models when you walk into Nix, but I think they're two approaches and both work for diff purposes. Infinite respect for Nixpkgs (the mothership) and also use flakes for my projects and machines.
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