I don’t feel like I know enough about Nix to manage my own build dependencies with it, but I do feel like I know enough to use Nix as a simple package manager. I use Homebrew on my laptop, and at this point I definitely know more about Nix than I do about Homebrew.1 Why would I switch away from Homebrew? Mostly because I think it will be educational. I don’t really have anything against Homebrew. It works. It has a lot of the packages I want. It does break more often than I’d like – n...| ianthehenry.com
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
Okay. So: so far I’ve managed to write a flake, but I have no idea how to… use it. And I’ve managed to restore nix search to functionality, basically, by pinning my nixpkgs flake… but now I am searching something different than I will be installing by using nix-env, or by referencing in my shell.nix files, and this bothers me. Which means I’m going to try the new flake-powered profiles, and figure out what the flake-equivalent version of a shell.nix is, and the new way to write nix-...| ianthehenry.com