| 20 Feb 2025 |
|  Merrkry joined the room. | 16:36:29 |
 ToxicFrog | validitymaiden: I would describe this space as being more aligned with those principles than cppnix.
I would also note that cppnix, lix, and nixpkgs are all separate projects -- you can contribute to nixpkgs without being involved in either lix or nix development. | 17:40:59 |
 validitymaiden | Thanks for that. I'm still digesting https://save-nix-together.org/ and trying to figure out which teams align themselves in which ways. I definitely don't want to find myself in an exclusive group when it comes to marginalized people, or helping US military contractors. I just want to learn more about nix, help out, and stop using my own shell scripts to get things working 😂 I found Lix by looking into the things raised by the open letter and wondered if this was a better community to get myself into. | 18:01:03 |
 Charles | maybe read https://lix.systems/community-standards/ if you haven't already (linked above already) | 18:04:13 |
| validitymaiden | Thanks for this. It certainly answers some of my questions regarding this community and I am aligned with it. | 18:07:54 |
| validitymaiden | I'm currently using nix installed as guided from https://nixos.org/download/ on macOS. Does this mean i'm using cppnix? | 18:13:00 |
 crop | yes | 18:14:36 |
| Charles | https://lix.systems/install/ | 18:17:08 |
| validitymaiden | My current installation is using home-manager and a home.nix file describing the packages to be installed. I haven't delved into flakes yet, and I had previously been using nix-env to install packages. I have some scripts I've written to "upgrade" nix by upgrading root's nix-channel and then using nix-env commands I've gotten from nix documentation | 18:20:53 |
| Charles |
I haven't delved into flakes yet
keep it that way tbh
| 18:21:21 |
| Charles | if you want source pinning use npins or something | 18:21:44 |
| validitymaiden | I have those here https://github.com/emilywilder/nixfiles | 18:22:03 |
| Charles | ... judging by the files you have there, the instructions you want to follow from lix's install page are the "On Any Other Linux/MacOS System" section, particularly the "Existing Installs" subsection | 18:23:38 |
 just1602 | In reply to @charles:computer.surgery
if you want source pinning use npins or something I'd really like an introduction article about how to that properly for a personal config or a server setup , because the two times I tried I was just starting with nix, but never succeed | 18:24:10 |
| Charles | non-flakes nixos configurations with pinned sources are somewhat involved unfortunately yeah | 18:25:29 |
| Charles | i have this setup working here if you want an example https://gitlab.computer.surgery/charles/dotfiles | 18:25:41 |
| Charles | you will note that there is in fact a flake.nix and flake.lock in this repository, but i'm using them literally just for flake-compat, so all they're doing is pinning sources lol | 18:26:08 |
| Charles | basically you need to do this to eval a nixos configuration without flakes: https://gitlab.computer.surgery/charles/dotfiles/-/blob/e6ac6204307792fbe6e199360bc3c559398c299c/nix/default.nix#L49-60 | 18:26:55 |
| Charles | then you SHOULD be able to use nixos-rebuild with the -f and -A options and just point to the attribute that has this as its value | 18:27:54 |
| Charles | (i have my own script i use instead of nixos-rebuild because i was having some probably-unrelated problems with it) | 18:28:21 |
| Charles | you may be interested in using https://gitlab.computer.surgery/charles/sprinkles to structure your projects similarly to flakes | 18:30:21 |
| validitymaiden | I noticed the "existing installs" section utilizes nix run which requires flakes, so I didn't know if I needed to be familiar with flakes to be able to use Lix once it is installed. | 18:30:30 |
| just1602 | Thanks Charles , I'll look at this | 18:31:05 |
| Charles | the part of flakes to avoid is actually writing flake.nix files; the only part you're using there is the new command line interface, which is fine | 18:31:37 |
| Charles | reason being, flakes are very under-designed and too entrenched to be fixed without breaking changes, and do too many things | 18:32:12 |
| Charles | * reason being, flakes are very under-designed and too entrenched to be fixed without breaking a lot of people's stuff even despite being an experimental feature, and do too many things | 18:32:31 |
|  Qyriad changed their profile picture. | 18:33:11 |
| Charles | writing a blog post explaining the non-flakes way in depth is a good idea, i may attempt this when i have time. i'm kinda swamped for the next week and a half or so though so it may be a while | 18:35:33 |
| just1602 | No pressure, I don't have a lot of free time neither, I totally understand | 18:37:04 |
| validitymaiden | Thanks for the direction; I now have Lix installed 🫶 | 18:42:29 |
