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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

Alpine has come cool perk: When a Nix user is flexing about declarative package management, live-edit your /etc/apk/world and run `apk fix` to show them how to do it without Nix.

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I generally prefer Gentoo's method: /var/lib/portage/world for manually installed packages, /var/lib/portage/world_sets for selected sets, and sets can be defined in /etc/portage/sets/. This allows you to split your packages into categories and only install certain bits on systems where you need them, as well as add any comments to the files as necessary. The equivalent to `apk fix` is `emerge -uDU @world && emerge -c` which is slightly more unwieldy but oh well.

Alpine allows something akin to sets by using `apk add -t setname pkg1 pkg2 pkg3`, which creates a dummy package which depends on your package selection. I generally create shell scripts in /etc/apk/sets/ to mimick the Gentoo experience, but it's not always the same.

I can reinstall Alpine from scratch in around the time it takes Nix to evaluate my system flake

That's cool but Nix/OS does much more than declarative package installs.

my fave Nix feature is telling people I use it

The new "I use Arch btw".

I use the nix package manager on Arch btw

Arguably the original one, too.

If it were easier to use, it wouldn’t be as big a flex. So we can’t be having that!

"It may be slow, but it's hard to use!"

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