I was Wrong about Nix, Christine Dodrill, Feb 2020

https://christine.website/blog/i-was-wrong-about-nix-2020-02-10

I was wrong about Nix. It’s actually quite good once you get past the documentation being baroque and hard to read as a beginner. I’m going to try and do what I can to get the documentation improved.

Dodrill wrote this post as a rebuttal to her own Thoughts on Nix, the closing paragraph here:

So, to recap: Nix is an attempt at a radically different approach to package management. It assumes too much about the state of everything and puts odd demands on people as a result. Language-specific package managers can and will fight Nix unless they are explicitly designed to handle Nix’s weirdness. As a side effect of making its package management system usable by normal users, it exposes the package manager database to corruption by any user mistake, curl2bash or malicious program on the system. All that functional purity uwu and statelessness can vanish into a puff of logic without warning.

Back to the post linked here:

I’ve been able to use my Go, Elm, Rust and Haskell dependencies on other machines using [this cachix approach]. It’s saved so much extra download time.

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