11mo ago

Nix in 100 Seconds - YouTube

cross-post from: https://programming.dev/post/18427616

14 comments

Fireship is consistently one of the best tutors on YouTube
I don't understand what this has that any other package manager, yum, apt etc doesn't.
dependencies stored in their own unique directory
Yeah so?
- it's replicable and "atomic", which for a well-designed modern package manager shouldn't be that noticable of a difference, but when it's applied to an operating system a la nixos, you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages. And backup the system state with only a few dozen kilobytes of config files instead of having to backup the entire hard drive (well, assuming the online infrastructure needed to build it in the first place continues to work as expected), and probably rollback a bad change much easier
  
  you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages.
  As can you with grepping your history of apt commands? And back up that to a file of a few dozen kilobytes too.
  Am I stupid?
Each package and its dependencies are stored in their own unique folder
If all those electron / web app haters could read, they'd be very upset right now.
- This is completely different from electron. Nix dependencies will be shared if they share the same hash. Electron just blindly copies everything over every time.
  
  Electron just copies over the browser engine required to run it, from a package management standpoint, assuming you're using nom or yarn, it functions the same as nix.
- ?

14 comments