A lightning talk I gave at May Contain Hackers 2022, prepared overnight after a beer.

I agree that dockerfile’s are not very reproducible. But honestly, that’s not how most people use it. I believe most people just pull the already built image which is very reproducible. Anyways, I found this video interesting and thought I’d share it and get your guys thoughts.

  • onlinepersonaEnglish
    93·
    2 年前

    flake? The experimental feature that hasn’t been stabilised for multiple years, isn’t officially part of the main package repository (nixpkgs), requires external tutorials and documentation because it doesn’t have an official tutorial and the most official documentation on it is in a man page about nix flakes, and has split the community in flakes vs no flakes, is better than a well documented (from the beginning mind you) file which is used throughout most of the industry?

    Yeah… no

    • λλλOPEnglish
      4·
      2 年前

      Great points! I wasn’t aware of any of that. Thanks for your input! :)

        • SciPiTie @iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
          3·
          2 年前

          Isn’t you disagreeing proving OPs point concerning the splitting of the community? :)

          That said: I’m completely new to nix and just like op described couldn’t get my hands on in depth primary documentation or references - could you help me there and point me to a good starting point?

          Thanks in advance!

            • Maurice Van Wassenhove@mastodon.social
              3·
              2 年前

              @natecox It is exactly this steep learning curve that pushed me away from nix and NixOS.

              It’s amazing what it can do but I just do not have the time and commitment to learn it. In the end, nix should be a tool and not a skill to master.

            • SciPiTie @iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
              1·
              2 年前

              Thanks for the link and tips! Do you have something similar specific to flakes? The basic concepts seem straight forward and actually chatgpt was of great help so far - but I can’t get the feet on the ground with these fancy new packages :D

  • Mattol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    61·
    2 年前

    Agree. The issue with reproducibility comes up mostly once you are building your own containers, many of them, and run them in production but then it can hit very hard because it becomes too expensive then to work around all of the following: Once you are hit by a problem (sometimes years after building the original one), it’s hard to debug bc you can’t be certain to be able to reproduce what you have. It’s even difficult to just find out what is in an existing Docker container, companies are running costly scans for that. And finally you can’t compose (you can mostly layer) as well one Docker container with another. Using Nix with flakes gets rid of all of that and you can still have Docker or other containers as output.