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
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
Some notes on using nix| Julia Evans
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
Okay. In the last post I got sort of an introduction to flakes, and I even wrote a flake, but I didn’t learn how to… do anything with flakes. My flake provided an overlay, but I have no idea how to make my Nixpkgs actually use that overlay. I have no idea what “my Nixpkgs” even means anymore. My channel? My flake? Everything I’ve learned about Nix has been turned upside down. But presumably if we keep reading, these blog posts will explain how to actually put them to use.| ianthehenry.com