Comment by azeirah
4 days ago
The more I use nix, the more I understand it's both. Nix is genuinely so fucking great, but the ecosystem and docs and language are a mess. It needs to be cleaned up, and things _are_ getting better.
The core philosophy of Nix is so damn solid though, and that's the real innovation here. As long as its philosophy manage to stick around, then it's ok.
This is how I feel about Nix.
I've given it a try and it's quite incredible how easy certain things are.
The problem is the Nix language and the developer experience are really rough.
There's a chance that Nix could figure this out or a competitor with Nix-like ideas could become mainstream. That's my hope anyway.
It would be a shame if the ideas behind Nix got dismissed because of the current issues with Nix.
It's basically, I refuse to learn how to containerize.
Just learn, use, promote best practices and stop forking the ecosystem _even_ further...
There, I got that off my chest.
As a heavy container user myself - I've been using containers since I needed to build my own 3.x kernel to test them - docker doesn't solve the reproducibility problem nix solves - IE, I can make a Dockerfile that does `RUN curl foo.com/install.sh` and who knows if that'll work ever again. Nix on the other hand doesn't allow you to do IO during builds[^0] only describe the effect of doing the IO.
[0]: Though apparently darwin (mac) doesn't support sandboxing by default, so you can bypass that but anyway
>who knows if that'll work ever again
Unless you restrict your nix files to specific channel revisions, which when I had to deal with it was poorly documented, and involved searching through specific channel commit hashes in a particularly opaque way, you also can't know that your nix derivations will ever work again.
A number of people on my field used nix as a way to make their research code repositories reproducible, and everything broke within around three years.
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You can just store the actual container though. Which will reproduce the environment exactly, it's just not a guidebook on how it was built.
The value of most reproducibility at the Dockerfile is that we're actually agnostic to getting a byte-exact reproduction: what we want is the ability to record what was important and effect upgrades.
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Containerizing an application is far easier than packaging an application for Nix - I think most avid Nix users would agree with that.
The reason why Nix users "refuse" to containerize is that Nix packages and their associated ecosystem come with a host of benefits that their containerized counterparts do not.
Nix handles containerization better than Docker does.
Here is a flake that builds a Go app and a Docker image for it (based on headless Chrome): https://github.com/aksiksi/ncdmv/blob/aa108a1c1e2c14a13dfbc0...
And here is how the image is built in CI: https://github.com/aksiksi/ncdmv/blob/aa108a1c1e2c14a13dfbc0...
here is a derivation that fetches https://www.usememos.com/ from source, changes the color palette, builds a docker image out of it and spins up a container that traefik exposes automatically: https://gist.github.com/knoopx/afde5e01389e3b8446f469c056e59...
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You're going to need to do more than just link to the flake if you want to show why that's better than the Dockerfile equivalent, because the code itself isn't selling it.
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The problem with docker is less the containerization and more the half-baked build system.
Nix and containerization aren't drop-in replacements for each other.
You can use Nix to build containers. Containers on their own don't guarantee reproducibility, especially if the build process isn't static and pure ( how many times do we `sudo apt update` inside a Dockerfile )?
And not everything is going to be containerizable. That only works for most applications. What if we're trying to manage our cloud servers? That's where Nix really shines.
Do you really think that Nix developers don't know how to containerize applications? You think people are using Nix because they refuse to learn how to containerize, and therefore opt to learn a _much more_ difficult and arcane build process? The logic doesn't track there.
Huh? I use Nix to create containers. Nix is a programming language, a build tool, a package manager and an entire ecosystem of extremely powerful tools.
The entire reason why I use Nix in the first place is because it allows me to containerize with _better_ reproducibility than docker itself.
I do get where you're coming from though. It's not immediately clear that Nix can do all this stuff. Nix is a lot more than just "glorified weird package manager".
At its core, Nix is a way to specify dependencies in a mathematically sound manner. Once you have that pure dependency graph managed with Nix, you can start doing the _real_ fun stuff.
Like, you can containerize it. Or you can create a VM from it, or an ISO, or a NixOS distribution with _only_ that package installed.
Nix actually makes containerization _easier_, not harder. But yes, I empathize. Nix is a mess and it is difficult to understand, it will take a few more years before it is fully settled.
In the meantime? I'm going all-in on Nix (the philosophy, not necessarily any particular variant) because I really strongly believe this is the way forward.
> Nix is a programming language, a build tool, a package manager and an entire ecosystem of extremely powerful tools
You have identified part of the problem.
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Well, yeah.
Nix is attempting to be better than containerization.
Saying "improvements aren't necessary because we already have 'good-enough' technology" is a meaningful argument when the improvements aren't significant.
In my view, they are significant because Nix can be used to create a fully featured OS instead of just a VM.
> they are significant because Nix can be used to create a fully featured OS instead of just a VM
Look up Bootable Containers project by RedHat [0]. Fully featured OS built from a Containerfile, bootable on bare metal.
I agree that Nix design is much better than Docker, and has a bunch of features that OCI ecosystem doesn't (e.g. remote builds[1], partial downloading of the build tree, non-linear build process[2], nix store import/export, overlays, I/O isolation, much better composability), but "creating OS instead of VM" [did you mean container?] is not one of them.
[0] https://github.com/containers/bootc
[1] You can use DOCKER_HOST, and I'm happy that this option is there, but Nix does it better.
[2] Perhaps with BuildKit it's no longer true, I haven't checked what happens if you have multi-staged build with one stage depending on multiple previous ones (which are otherwise unconnected). I think Earthly can parallelize this scenario https://earthly.dev/
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containers with build scripts are a bandaid over broken systems, it's better practice then having zero executable documentation on how to stand up a system, but it's also far from the best that could exist.
eelco thesis: 2003
lxc: 2008
docker: ~2012
no thank you.