Comment by eeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eeh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I can see why the blog post gives the impression that packaging is involved, because the author is creating packages! However, what's novel is that the author is packaging their own software (a blog). A Debian and Ubuntu maintainer isn't going to package Joe Blogg's blog.

NixOS also has package maintainers, which the author of this blog post relies on (see "nixos.graphviz").

Traditional distributions also allow you to package your own software.

The difference between a traditional distribution and NixOS is that NixOS makes packaging your own software (and config) easily and safely enough to treat as first-class citizens along with the distro's own packages. So much so that I don't think of NixOS packages as "packages". Rather, I just see them as config/code.

I mainly nix-ified my blog build to make a docker image that is as small as possible.

Compare my super-optimised dockerfile results:

$ docker images | grep xena xena/christinewebsite latest eb8c27a1a5d2 12 seconds ago 121MB

To the naiive nix results:

$ docker images | grep xena xena/christinewebsite latest b087ad7fb924 50 years ago 102MB

This image ends up only including my blog (statically compiled), ca certificates (because of the patreon integration), time zone data files (because of the go time package), iana port numbers (something to do with the go net package) and mailcap (for some reason). It's puny!

so, what makes up the 19MB difference? (i assume it's not caused by the nix one being MUCH older :-)

couldn't you simply do a multi-stage docker-image (in the not-nix situation),where you just copy over the go binary into the final docker-image, and add the needed files?

The 19 MB difference is alpine linux crud, musl and other base things in my custom docker base image.

In theory I could do the multi-stage docker approach to get an as-tiny-as-possible setup (and I actually do this: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/master/Dockerfile) but that won't cover ca-certificates generically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com