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Nix the language enables you to write explicit build recipes that can be reproducibly built with good integrity guarantees and granular and distinct knowledge of the build-time dependencies and the run-time dependencies (so you only ever transmit closures that have what they need to execute). Nix the set of tools gives you convenient command line tools that can: evaluate Nix language expressions, build recipes, analyze build-time or run-time dependency graphs of a recipe, give you ephemeral shells with the packages you want in scope but not installed "globally", package management tools to install packages globally, and recipe diffing tools so you can see how recipes changed. Nix the package manager is a convenient, gigantic, community effort to explicitly describe how to (reproducibly) build almost all of the OSS software that users need and it comes with a substitution cache so that most recipe build products are easily substituted when installing, so you don't have to build. Even if you don't use Nix, nixpkgs is still impressive because you have the most explicit documentation for how to build a piece of software from source and all of its dependencies than anywhere else on the internet, it usually rivals project author's in its specificity, explicitness, and clarity. NixOS the Linux distribution combines all of this together with a convenient configuration module system and generally good defaults to give you an operating system that is declaratively specified from your etc hosts file all the way down to the recipe for building the kernel, a rich and granular dependency graph, reproducible OS configuration builds, and diffs between closures. My biggest gripe with Nix is the lack of static types. This was the originator's biggest mistake that Nix will be living with for a very long time to come. Static types would have helped bring the learning curve down IMHO and made it easier to document and less frustrating to debug. That being said, the overall properties of Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS far outweigh the pain points in my six years of production experience with it and for what we care about: auditability, reproducibility, explicitness, efficiency, and integrity. |