Comment by dankobgd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dankobgd | Hacker News Reader

I gave it a go twice and i just couldn't stick to using it. So many annoying little problems in general that i gave up. I configured system in the end but it was still annoying. I even had conflicts with some pkgs like Smile emoji picker and Gearlever, ok you can say: why do you need that? but lets say i do. And i got a conflict and couldn't install them together. I thought the whole point of nix is to have independent pkgs but i get in practice a conflict which now i have to figure out how to solve and there is no info online. There are many bugs and bad abstractions. I can use nix for local dev (devshells) though.

With Ansible i get repeatable setup of my whole system. I can setup and install every program, configure it (dotfiles), setup services automatically and users and i have vault to easily encrypt secrets end embed them or template things out which is much nicer than using nix. I run a playbook and set everything up in 15 mins and the most "annoying" thing i have to do is basically log into few websites that i use daily.

Interesting, I’m not sure how you managed to get conflicts between packages, that’s a violation of the Nix model. If you describe the issue more I’d like to dig into it, even if you don’t use Nix any longer it’d be nice to fix the issue for those who do.

I forgot exactly what it said in error msg, but it was some conflict with like Meson build file apparently already existed or something

Interesting, I’ll try to repro! For clarity, each “derivation” (lets say package) builds in its own hermetically sealed filesystem with its own dependencies. So conflicts in build system configuration shouldn’t be possible unless those packages are doing something impure (unlikely since the Nixpkgs CI tests for it) or the end user is doing something impure (still really hard to do).

on github this was my config: https://github.com/dankobg/nixos-conf. I had that in home.nix. They both couldn't be listed in that apps array at same time, gearlever specifed and smile commented works and vice versa. But doing nix shell -p with both worked together. I didn't have patience to check what was the problem since maybe it's some of the other apps as well.

I see the conflict warning you're referring to, but I can confirm that in my bare minimum repro, those packages can be installed in a system alongside each other, and the warning stays just a warning. I think both packages can be improved by filtering the meson.build file out of the stuff that is exported from each package into the environment. I'll need to investigate that more.

As far as your overall problem goes however, there's likely something else at play. You've nerd sniped me now, so I'll spend some time when I have some next to try to build a test harness for your exact config.

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