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Comment by lfam | Hacker News Reader

In Guix, we address this problem with grafting.

Rather than rebuild everything that depends on the fixed glibc, we build the fixed glibc, then rewrite all references to the old glibc to refer to the new one. That rewriting happens in new copies of the referring packages, of course, since the "store" is immutable.

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Security-... https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=8470

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Nix has a way of doing this as well, just needs a better UX (like most of nix).

> just needs a better UX

Luckily guix is a better UX for nix. =)

I was quite surprised that `nix install vim` didn't work out of the box. More so after realising that there's not even a `nix` command.

I see that there's a bunch of `nix-whatever` tools around, but even their names aren't much sensible.

I'm not in doubt that nix is technically superior to homebrew, but UX-wise it's at least been a disappointing experience for me.

What Nix for Mac needs more than anything is a great, simple overview of how to use it in practice, for casual users. I use it as my main package manager, but I install software with it rarely enough that I need to dig around in the manpages every time.

Doesn't this affect the promised reproducibility of builds?

No, there's no compromise there.

You end up with a new, grafted dependency graph, which can be reproduced just like the un-grafted graph. Is there some other reproducibility issue you see?

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