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
Nix 2.4 came out on November 1, 2021, and that’s sort of a big deal. It’s been more than two years since the last major Nix release, and there are some pretty important changes. Including some breaking changes, which is why I have waited so long to upgrade. Because I think that, in order to keep using Nix, I’m finally going to have to learn what “flakes” are, and do a bunch of other stuff just to restore the functionality that I was enjoying before. Or maybe not. It might be painles...| ianthehenry.com