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by whateveracct 821 days ago
It's not actually unreadable - you just have to learn convention on top of the Nix language. For instance, what mkDerivation does. Actually, the Nix language usage here is somewhat minimal. Mostly let bindings (aka lambda calculus).

I wouldn't expect a layman to be able to grok that file. That's fine though - it's not for laymen.
1 comments
guitarbill 821 days ago
> It's not actually unreadable - you just have to learn convention on top of the Nix language. For instance, what mkDerivation does. Actually, the Nix language usage here is somewhat minimal. Mostly let bindings (aka lambda calculus).

> I wouldn't expect a layman to be able to grok that file. That's fine though - it's not for laymen.

This is the kind of comment that makes me want to stay far, far away from Nix and the Nix "community".

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whateveracct 821 days ago
Why? Saying that Nix is complicated and isn't trivial to use or read without learning prerequisite knowledge is bad now?

I actually pointed out that mkDerivation is something helpful to learn - that's one thing I wish someone made me sit and learn when I first got exposed to Nix. It unlocks a lot.

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chrisandchris 820 days ago
I wouldn't state it's _bad_. It just adds another layer of complexity (by, for sure, also giving something back) and as someone not working in Fortune 500 (but rather in a SME with <20 people), another layer of conplexity & another language is sonetimes just not feasable.
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takeda 821 days ago
I think whateveracct was referring to is this link:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...

What that file is doing, is building a package, and it essentially is a combination of what Makefile and what RPM spec file does.

I don't know if you're familiar with those tools, but if you aren't it takes some time to know them enough to understand what is happening. So why would be different here?

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