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Comment by DonbunEf7 | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen Nix? It can be used in this way, and its configuration language is relatively good.

Nix + Nixops gives him everything he wants. He'd have to learn to write nix expressions, which does put people off.

Containers are great if you've got racks full of actual, physical servers and want to use them efficiently. Most people don't have that problem, though.

Both nix and guix seem to have potential. Not sure if they are the "silver-bullet" (in the good sense of actually nailing a hard problem well) but perhaps. IMO they are a bit too (local) package oriented than necessary.

People want absolute determinism at all levels (which Nix can promise), but don't want to go through the hassle that requires.

I love the idea of nix but haven't had a chance to try.

Can you post a link to how nix handles resource permissioning?

A note about nix: I've found the language to be very obtuse and the documentation out of date and fragmented. However the worst sin has been the attitude of several community members: insulting new developers, ignoring valid questions, and self-promotion at the expense of civility. I love the idea behind the system and like most of the community, but the very vocal jerks really put me off.

I just wish to report that I had only good experience in communicating with Nix/Nixos/Nixpkgs community.

When someone could solve something that didn't work for me, they did. When no one could or didn't have time, they kept silent or politely tried to help me find the solution myself. And everything absolutely for free!

I've never learned the nix language, but that hasn't been an issue in my usage for the last couple years. It's really easy to add a new expression for a package, which is all I've ever used it for.

Sucks to hear about the negativity. For what it's worth, I've gotten a handful of pull requests accepted with positive experience each time.

My mileage is different than yours. When I started using NixOS on my laptop I've asked for help a bunch of times on the #nixos IRC channel and people were really helpful.

This was somewhere in the second half of last year.

What do you mean by "resource permissioning"? There doesn't seem to be anything in the article about that.

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