| 8 Aug 2022 |
 David Arnold (blaggacao) | * Zhaofeng Li: I find this resumes well the impetus of a swappable evaluator. We have to introduce the two thought categories of _vartical_ software feameworks and _horizontal_ ones. True _congruent configurations_ (even: _hypercongruent_) need both interfaces. I'm copying my agrument from a private discussion:
> `styx` has the same problem as `colmena` , `deploy-rs`, et al.
> It evolved into a _vertical_ (tool centric) framework that is a bit hard to marry with a _horizontal_ (integration centric) one like `std`.
> I understood this abstract pattern with colemna and came up with a solution that involves for such tooling to have a pluggable evaluator interface to accomodate integration-centric evalutors, while still mostly preserving the look & feel (and branding/docs) of the native tooling. | 17:09:50 |
| David Arnold (blaggacao) | To put it with physics, we need to iprove the bond-energy of otherwise linux-philosophy tool-atoms.
On the command line, the bond is very clear, usually it's |.
But that simplicity doesn't apply for a nix fabric. | 17:15:22 |
| David Arnold (blaggacao) | * To put it with a chemistry analogy to assent the argument: we need to iprove the bond-energy of otherwise linux-philosophy tool-atoms.
On the command line, the bond is very clear, usually it's `|`.
But that simplicity doesn't apply for a `nix` fabric. | 17:15:56 |
| David Arnold (blaggacao) | * To put it with a chemistry analogy to assent the argument: we need to improve the bond-energy of otherwise linux-philosophy tool-atoms.
On the command line, the bond is very clear, usually it's `|`.
But that simplicity doesn't apply for a `nix` fabric. | 17:16:16 |
| David Arnold (blaggacao) | * To put it with a chemistry analogy to assent the argument: we need to improve the bond-energy of otherwise linux-philosophy tool-atoms.
On the command line, the bond is very clear, usually it's `|`.
But that simplicity doesn't apply for a repository-spanning (i.e. world-spanning) `nix` fabric. | 17:16:52 |
| 10 Aug 2022 |
|  luxus joined the room. | 09:54:50 |
 dantefromhell | In reply to @blaggacao:matrix.org
To put it with a chemistry analogy to assent the argument: we need to improve the bond-energy of otherwise linux-philosophy tool-atoms.
On the command line, the bond is very clear, usually it's |.
But that simplicity doesn't apply for a repository-spanning (i.e. world-spanning) nix fabric. very true, as someone who has 20+ years of itops this still feels mostly unresolved and often unthought of.
I'm curious if you can provide more details to the solution you found? | 21:14:41 |
| David Arnold (blaggacao) | Well, colmena uses an evaluator (instead of for example the nix bundle interface) in order to parallelize the evaluation. So at its heart, it's a speed consideración.
The receptor interface is established in src/nix/eval.nix and that defines the incoming schema as well as the intermediate schema that can be processed by the CLI.
There are two solutions:
- don't use an evaluator, but rather consume a well-knowm flake attribute (which is already evaluated - this is the
divnix/std approach with __std)
- make the evaluator swappable
colmena --eval ./path/to/eval.nix so that you can consume arbitrary inout contracts via a custom evaluator.
Since colmena strives for optimization and parallelization, the second option is really the beat choixe.
For something like divnix/styx, I don't know yet, I'll probably just going to wrap the nix bundle interface within the CLI. It's probably not parallelized, but it is easly swappable for a custom evaluator. WIP, so I might get more insight as I go. | 21:21:43 |
| David Arnold (blaggacao) | From the bundler docs:
A bundler must be a function that accepts an arbitrary value (typically a derivation or app definition) and returns a derivation.
| 23:50:31 |
| 11 Aug 2022 |
 Jane Jasperous | man nix3-bundle | 08:24:47 |
| Jane Jasperous | * man nix3-bundle
and
https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers
| 08:25:57 |
| Jane Jasperous | * man nix3-bundle
and
https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers
I had missed this
| 08:31:04 |
| 13 Aug 2022 |
|  @ronnypfannschmidt:matrix.org joined the room. | 12:01:57 |
|  farcaller joined the room. | 14:26:22 |
| farcaller | o/ I'm a bit confused as to where do I start, given colmena requires a host that's already running nixos (unless I missed anything?) can I just nix-build some base image for a vm myself then? do I need to be somehow specific about it? | 14:28:16 |
| farcaller | actually looking at what it did to a test system it seems that it pretty much wiped everything kubevirt builder did and got the “new” nixos rolling. Am I correct to assume that the base system is effectively lost configuration wise so it doesn’t really matter what I boot into? | 15:33:26 |
|  problems joined the room. | 17:08:05 |
 jhillyerd | Yeah, that's typically how nixos deploys work, the base system is mostly lost. | 17:24:00 |
