Caution for OS X users — https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925
This reminds me of GOROOT/GOPATH and other complexities that arise when systems care too much about paths.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9o44id/how_do_you_au...
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/9mm2pb/syncing_acros...
In the future, file systems will be immutable and only a few sanctioned volumes will be writable (if any). It'd be better if systems like this abstracted away the notion of the file system and operating system altogether. Everything should be virtual and that is how hermeticity and reproducibility should be achieved.
That said, I admire the work you're doing and can't really point fingers as I'm not a contributor.
If any?! Where do I put my files if not on a filesystem? In some corporate cloud? Writable filesystems for corporations but not for the common plebian? Is that the sort of dystopian future you're envisioning?
If I've misunderstood what you're saying, then I apologize. But I'm alarmed by my perception of what you're saying.
Some of them do it under .config.
Some systems write to /usr/local
Some things scope to the project you're working in. Python venv, node_modules, etc.
Build systems, such as Cargo, Maven, and Pants each do their own thing.
Make, autotools...
Have you looked at an Android filesystem? I don't even know how to describe it.
Everything everywhere is horribly inconsistent.
I'm thinking in terms of workloads, of which building and linking are merely types of work that produce artifacts. There are many types: server workloads, jobs, userland software.
If you semantically declare what a workload needs, what dependencies it has, where those dependencies must exist, and what outputs it produces, everything can be wired together logically and hermetically.
I'm hoping the immutable containers of the Docker/microservice world make their way onto the desktop.
If I can reduce my entire desktop environment into a single config file and have it reliably reconstruct itself, it would be magical. I would freeze and wipe my machine constantly.
Of course writable, mutable volumes will exist for humans, but software can't play in that realm or it will lose hermeticity.
I've sort of gotten off track and am no longer speaking about package managers / build systems. I think there's a more general solution to all of these problems.
You can do this with Nix. I do this with Nix even on non-NixOS machines. The thing is that Nix has a certain "path of enlightenment" that one needs to walk until it becomes a tool that adds certain capabilities[0] to your mental model.
All the software is inconsistent, but we can wrap it consistently by whichever means are necessary for that particular thing. Anything from flags setting paths to dynamically patching the source (and describing that operation as code) is possible.
[0]: e.g. https://git.tazj.in/tree/web/cgit-taz/default.nix#n61
I might be missing something, but it sounds like that's what home-manager[1] was designed to do. Certainly works pretty well for me.
Certainly not on any system I will ever choose to use.
Your "everything is virtual" will also make it increasingly trivial for a process tree to elect to see some arbitrary filesytem tree at /nix, so that physical volume configuration won't matter and there is no "canonical" filesystem layout to make /nix feel intrusive.
- With Nix, every path in /nix/store has its own ./bin, ./share, ./lib, etc. As such, putting /nix anywhere but in / doesn't make much sense
- And honestly, it's just short, fresh and distinctly different. The path symbolizes that Nix isn't bound by the conventions of other distro's
And problems with changing this now:
- It would be a huge amount of effort, there's many places where this location is assumed, not only in code, but also by people
- Finding the workforce to actually do this change will be near impossible, as the only benefit is a slightly easier installation for the latest macOS version, which is not Nix's main platform
What are you talking about? There’s no such decision. The first comment mentions it as a possibility, but the rest of the (very long) thread is exploring different ways to solve the issue.
In that link they describe how to make a firmlink, its seems like they have a way to just keep doing their thing as before
(edit, reworded)
There's one or two early comments which float the idea that Apple/Catalina's problematic technical change "may force us to drop support for macOS...". That prompted lots of -1's, and then there's a gigantic thread where people are trying to figure out how to adapt, and that's an on-going/non-trivial process.
Did I miss something? Is there actually a policy decision buried mid-thread that's hard to see?
In your comment, I pick up some fear/vulnerability. There's no reassuring voice to say, "macOS Catalina support will be fixed yesterday!" I share that sense of fear/vulnerability, but I think it's a natural trade-off when you sign up for free/open/transparent/community-driven software. For better and worse, you get to watch how the sausage is made in real-time.