Closing the Nix gap: From environments to packaged applications for rust (opens in new tab)

I followed this relatively closely and there is no conflict of interest. There is competition, though. With flakes. That’s a good thing in general (competition is good) and in the case of flakes, specifically (flakes are lackluster).

It is the opposite of conflict of interest. Both devenv and the Nix community at large benefits from the growth of Nix.

You're flat out wrong. Devenv is the defacto standard solution in the Nix community for setting up per-project development environments and services, which is exactly what the linked submission asked for. Calling it a Nix fork like you did in your linked comment makes much sense as torching Debian for "shilling a Linux fork" just because they package patched kernels.

tl;dr: no.

This commenter is just wrong. denenv.nix pretty much is flake.nix + services. It has since grown more features, but this kind of use case is exactly its niche.

Devenv isn't a Nix fork and doesn't compete with Nix. Its scope is narrower and it's downstream of Nix. The code you write for configuring Devenv is ordinary Nix code. Its configuration system is a perfectly ordinary Nix module system.

There is a `devenv` CLI tool, and that CLI bundles a downstream soft fork of Nix that carries a few patches. Those patches exist to make it possible to read `devenv.nix` rather than `flake.nix` and use an easily programmatically editable yaml file for defining flake inputs. Other than that, all of the patches are just PRs that are open against mainline Nix that are included to speed up evaluation, notably the patchset for "lazy trees" or "source tree abstraction" (which is also in the Determinate Nix distribution of Nix).

But you can actually use the core features of Devenv (that is, the module system for configuring environments) without using the Devenv CLI or the patched evaluator. This isn't a hidden thing or a hack, either— it's documented on https://devenv.sh . It's always been this way, and isn't a paywall boundary or a trick. The whole of Devenv is open-source, and the vast majority of the code is Nix modules that you can use with any Nix implementation that you like (though flakes support makes it easier; Devenv's modules are exposed as flake-parts modules).

Hell, you can even use large subsets of devenv's functionality without using devenv at all. One of its key features is a Nix wrapper/integration for the pre-commit framework for managing git hooks. That whole subset of functionality is extremely loosely coupled to devenv, and lives in a separate repo. You can just import it as a flake-parts module with vanilla Nix without using devenv at all (i.e., not even the module system).

There's some code duplication with Nix (optional evaluator patches) and Nixpkgs (downstream release channel for guaranteeing integration with devenv's language configuration options, also optional (my team doesn't use it at all)), but it's extremely misleading to characterize Devenv as a fork of any Nix community projects including those two.

Just posting a link to the Devenv website is admittedly not a high-effort reply, but recommending Devenv is absolutely a fair reply to the post you linked. (Given that that post explicitly mentions not wanting to use Devenv, it definitely deserved a real conversation instead of what it got.)

PS: I'm not affiliated with devenv or Cachix. I just use it at work and know the code a little from times that I've filed bugs or submitted patches.

Yes, it does vendor all the crates to Nix store.

It results into speed up in a way that if your application doesn't change, you'll just get the binary package.

That's why the two interfaces are exposed: one for development feedback cycle and one for distribution.

Yes, it caches compiled crates in the Nix store which significantly speeds up builds, especially for projects with large dependency trees.

We're aiming to take Nix to its most simple form, while devbox uses json for configuration.

Think of devenv as systemd of developer environments.

This post is talking about building your project with Nix, and only tangentially about dev environments à la devbox.

> Steam does not have this problem. Download game, play game. Software is not that complicated.

Steam on Linux essentially has its own "package manager" which uses containerized runtimes: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools

> I’m increasingly convinced that the mere existence of a package manager (for programs, not source code) is a sign of a failed platform design.

Nix is a build system for source code, similar to make. It is such a robust build system that it also can be used as a package manager with a binary cache

Does Steam let you control the whole dependency tree of your software, including modifying any part of it and rebuilding from source as necessary, or pushing it to a whole other machine?

Real life software is much more than just downloading a game and running it.

> I’m increasingly convinced that the mere existence of a package manager (for programs, not source code) is a sign of a failed platform design

> Steam does not have this problem. Download game, play game.

These statements seem contradictory. Steam is a package manager. So is the Apple App Store. Sure, they have different UX than, say, apt/dnf/brew/apk/chocolatey, but they're conceptually package managers.

Given that, I'm unclear what the gripe is (though I'm totally down to rip on Snap/Flatpak; I won't rant here, but I did elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069483). Is the issue with OS/vendor-maintained package managers? Or is the issue with package installers that invoke really complicated build systems at install time (e.g. package managers that install from source)?