Oooookay. I said I was gonna read the manual, right? I’ll do it. I’ll read it. I already read all those functions, didn’t I? It’s time for Part VI: Command Reference.| ianthehenry.com
It’s been several days since I reinstalled a bunch of stuff with Nix instead of Homebrew, and so far everything has been fine. I mean, the software I installed, like, works the same. As far as I can tell. But I realize that I should probably update my packages, and see if there are any juicy new bytes to keep my hard drive entertained. I really didn’t expect that this would be worthy of a blog post but, well, here we are: my first upgrade. Attempt.| ianthehenry.com
We open on a chat conversation that I had with my good friend and former colleague “Doug,” in which we were discussing my experience reading through the Nix manual. ian: there were certain things that i wanted to learn how to do ian: and i still don't really know how to do them ian: like ian: it seems like ian: you should just have a file ian: called "ian.nix" ian: where you write down the things you want ian: and then there should be a way to say "install exactly this set of things" ian:...| ianthehenry.com
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So this isn’t great: $ nix-env -i python3 installing 'python3-3.10.0a5' Why isn’t this great? Well, because in the Python versioning scheme, python3-3.10.0a5 is short for “Python 3.10.0 alpha version 5.” The latest stable release of the Python reference implementation, right now, is actually 3.9.5. 3.10 is currently considered the “pre” branch, and 3.11 is currently the “dev” branch. I think; I’m not really a Python person. So it’s not great that a new Nix user might try t...| ianthehenry.com
I opened a PR a few days ago to try to fix the issue I ran into with nix-env -u trying to upgrade to a weird alpha pre-release version of Python. In my head, I was making the world a better place. It was an issue that bit me; it was an issue that bit someone who emailed me; it seemed like an issue worth fixing. But the maintainer of Python responded to that PR with: I don’t think we should be doing this. Yes, it resolves the issue for python3, but there are others out there as well. “It i...| ianthehenry.com