WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 12335907

(no title)

lil1729 | 9 years ago

I used nixos for a few weeks and then went back to Debian.

* I share the concern of the author on symlinks farm. It is scary! I would like it to be dealt with in the filesystem layer (Plan 9 had a snapshot based filesystem - fossil - years ago). Symlinks have all sorts of weird semantics on different Unix machines.

* Another of my gripe with nixos is that it makes Unix, a single user machine! Sure, packages need not be installed in a user-local way. I may be ignorant of other possibilities here.

* More care for licenses. I still use Debian because they really care for licenses. Last I looked, nixos was in no way close to Debian in terms of documenting the various copyrights and licenses of files pertaining to a package.

Otherwise, Nixos is a great idea and a huge step forward.

discuss

order

chriswarbo|9 years ago

Regarding licenses, most (all?) packages in the official nixpkgs repo have license metadata, and you can set your configuration to forbid/allow proprietary packages (the "allowUnfree" option), or use a whitelist (e.g. forbid everything except Flash).

Guix is a GNU project, and doesn't allow proprietary packages in their collection at all.

lil1729|9 years ago

Yes. But the amount of information in the debian/copyright file is a lot more than just one scalar flag. I think that level of detail on the licenses is extremely important.

akavel|9 years ago

Why do you believe it makes Unix a single user machine??? I'm not aware of any reason for such statement, can you elaborate?

lil1729|9 years ago

I think I should have been clear. It does not make Unix single user machine but it is more useful for cases where a single user is the main user of a machine like the laptop user.

My reasoning was very simple. Nixos makes it easy to install packages on a per user basis. This would mean there is a lot of redundancy if another user also needs the same package. A snapshot/dedup filesystem will easily solve the problem.