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PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Huh.

IDK man, my experience is that Nix solves the problem you originally talked about and a bunch of others, pretty effectively. Among other things if things “just… don’t work” you can trivially roll back to an earlier working config, and see what changed between working and not-working, and so what would be a pretty grueling debugging process in some other environment becomes pretty easy to sort out.

But whatever. If for some reason Docker makes you more happy and not less, you’re welcome to it and best of luck.

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Boomkop3@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Perhaps it’s improved over the last year, I can give it a shot. But yes, for my own packaged applications without shared dependencies, docker is handy. And that’s exclusively what I run

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- PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I mean if it makes you happy, I won’t tell you to do anything different. I think a certain amount of it is just prejudice against Docker on my part. Just in my experience NixOS is the best of both worlds: You can have a single coherent system if everything in that system can play nice with each other, and if not, then things can be containerized completely that way still works too. And then on top it has a couple of other nice features like rolling back configs easily, or source builds that get slotted in in-place as if they were standard packages (which is generally where I abandon Docker installs of things, because making changes to the source seems like it’s going to be a big hassle).
  
  I’m not trying to evangelize though, you should in all seriousness just do what you find to be effective.
  
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  - Boomkop3@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Hold up, nix added containerization? How did I miss that? I will have another look now!
    
    Also, you’re right. For small quick scripts docker can be a hassle. Nowadays though I add building a docker image as part of my project’s build/compilation process. The main reason I do this is so that I can work with whatever machine I happen to be on, then just copy paste the app to whatever machine I want it on. No extra config or even a look at the environment required. Just install docker and forget about the rest
    
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    PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Hold up, nix added containerization? How did I miss that? I will have another look now!
    
    Nix is containerization.
    
    [hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ python --version Python 3.12.8 [hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ nix-shell -p python39 this path will be fetched (27.46 MiB download, 80.28 MiB unpacked): /nix/store/jrq27pp6plnpx0iyvr04f4apghwc57sz-python3-3.9.21 copying path '/nix/store/jrq27pp6plnpx0iyvr04f4apghwc57sz-python3-3.9.21' from 'https://cache.nixos.org/'... [nix-shell:~]$ python --version Python 3.9.21 [nix-shell:~]$ exit exit [hap@glimmer:/proc/69235/fd]$ python --version Python 3.12.8
    
    The whole “system” you get when moving from Nix to NixOS is basically just a composition of a whole bunch of those individual things, in one big container that is “the system.” But you can also fire up temporary containers trivially for particular things. I have a couple of tools with source in ~/src which, whenever I change the source, nix-os rebuild will automatically fire up a little container to rebuild them in, and if it works, it’ll deploy the completed product into my main system image for me, but if it doesn’t then nothing will have changed (and either way it throws away the container it used to attempt the build in).
    
    Each config change spawns a new container for the main system OS image (“generation”), but you can roll back to one of the earlier generations (which are, from a functional perspective, still around) if you want or if you broke something.
    
    And so on. It’s very nice.
    
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