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Comment by filmor | Hacker News Reader

It still doesn't have a concept akin to use-flags, which is what distinguishes Gentoo from Linux from Scratch, see https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/12877. The fact that Nix doesn't have these is also one reason why it's easier to cache than Gentoo packages.

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Well, it doesn’t have global ones, but you can very trivially override attributes for a specific package if you want.

Flags are a great concept, but basically will exponentially increase the required build cache size, and imo having everything in the binary cache and optionally compile only some specific package is a great tradeoff.

Someone announced a fork of NixOS to add USE flags and remove Systemd ages ago on the mailing list, before the Nix community added Discourse. They called what they were starting 'The Church of Suckless NixOS'.

I never saw a sign of them after the initial announcement.

Agreed that there is nothing quite so unified and easy as USE flags for compile time options, although nix happily lets you ex. override build options per-package, and I think overlays let you do large scale changes.

On this regard, Guix is better than Nix imo : you can rewrite expressions quite easily in a programmatic manner thanks to Guile, which is also used for package definitions ( https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Defining-Package-Va... or https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Package-Transformat... )

How is it different from nix overrides?

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