1mo ago

Bonfire & Guix, a love story -- fishinthecalculator

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31718711

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fishinthecalculator @lemmy.ml

1mo ago

Bonfire & Guix, a love story -- fishinthecalculator

fishinthecalculator.me /blog/bonfire--guix-a-love-story.html

Selfhosted @lemmy.world

fishinthecalculator @lemmy.ml

1mo ago

Bonfire & Guix, a love story -- fishinthecalculator

fishinthecalculator.me /blog/bonfire--guix-a-love-story.html

7 comments

I quickly went through the article, and I have a question: Why not Docker (or Podman) on NixOS?
NixOS has much larger community (although a bit toxic) and provides native tooling for managing OCI containers through Docker and Podman.
- I find Guix far better on almost every remark, in no particular order:
  as you said some part of the Nix community is made of techbros (even if Guix attracts some fossbros as well)
  the way governance is structured in the Nix community is brittle, just see the drama from which all the new Nix forks spawned
  better documentation. The doc for Nix is scattered, the Guix manual, albeit not perfect, is much more complete
  the Guile language is far clearer than Nix, also you don't have to use it only for package recipes, you can build full applications with it
  the Guix story around trustability of binaries is far better (checkout how Guix boostrapps everything), entires classes of vulnerabilities are prevented by design
  the Guix UX is far better designed imho, the command line is intuitive and well documented and features are easily composable
  the community is not diverging, as is the case for Nix flakes
  Guix as well provides OCI integration, check out the point about enabling gocix
  
  I don't have any experience with guix, so I will not express any opinions towards that.
  However, regarding NixOS:
  Yes, as a person with experience in the Nix language, I can confirm it's awful
  The documentation of NixOS is a known issue, and there are currently efforts to improve it
  Talking about the trustability of binaries, by doing a quick search, I read that Guix builds are reproducible. This is true for NixOS as well. All upstreamed packages must have their version and the hash of the code (or artifact), to allow verification
  The community of NixOS is opting to maintaining flakes, because:
  Some applications can simply not be built following the Nix guidelines. Examples are some electron apps (like Falkor) and apps that have weird toolchains (like bubblejail)
  The reviewing process takes way too long, and PRs for upstreaming are often ignored. This forces a lot of people to just PR a flake.nix to the application, or maintain their own overlays (overlays are like overriding the available packages, while flakes are more like distributing Nix code in general)

7 comments