Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. What's more, if we're talking about user hostility, how hostile is when a software doesn't provide a configurable install dir? It's literally a single damn variable!!

View on HN

> doesn't provide a configurable install dir

This is completely false. You can change the installation directory at the cost of losing binary packages. When you change it, packages would be built from source instead. This is what Homebrew does too.

What's more, I don't think many package managers provide this option. Not apt, not yum.

Homebrew itself recommends you not do this, and while it is getting better at working in this case you will still run into issues if you try to do certain things.

[Spack](https://spack.io) uses patchelf and additional tooling to relocate it's binary packages to other paths. It generally works, although one has to special case things that burn their install directory into their builds (e.g. Perl).

it's a single variable which many parts of the system need to have knowledge about, some parts which have basically no way to feed in a variable. You can change the root directory in nix, but that invalidates all binary packages, in part because rpath is not at all configurable.

This is not the case. The problem is that caching is based on the default path which is /nix. So they would have to rebuild all caches.

Maybe they shouldn't have built it that way then. In my experience nix is nothing but a huge pain in the ass if you don't buy fully into the system, weird design decisions and all

Reply on news.ycombinator.com