| 16 Jun 2023 |
 Sandro 🐧 | and the PR is from volth so we have no clue what it was about | 21:19:41 |
| 18 Jun 2023 |
 adamcstephens | Maybe they’d be open to changing that setting? | 02:01:11 |
 asymmetric | https://mtlynch.io/notes/nix-first-impressions/ | 18:04:26 |
| asymmetric | Lists zero-to-nix as the best learning resource for beginners | 18:04:54 |
| asymmetric | We (official docs) are nowhere on that list 😢 (yet) | 18:05:24 |
| asymmetric | But they do mention this: https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/build-and-deploy/installing-nixos-on-a-raspberry-pi | 18:06:25 |
| asymmetric | 
Download ima_d29f93d.png | 18:07:47 |
| asymmetric | This seems to agree with the position that it’s not Nixlang that people struggle with, but the basic concepts | 18:08:28 |
| asymmetric | Maybe? | 18:08:58 |
 Dominic Mills | I agree with this view | 18:10:19 |
| Dominic Mills | For the longest time I couldn't understand what flakes were and what utility it's provided over using a nix shell. | 18:11:17 |
| Dominic Mills | Redacted or Malformed Event | 18:12:03 |
| Dominic Mills | The most illuminating piece of exposition I saw was the Reddit post that actually made me gain a good understanding of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/13ye3lg/what_are_the_advantages_of_using_flakes/ | 18:14:16 |
| Dominic Mills | I think a lot of very basic concepts in Nix such as overlays, channels, derivations, binary caches, etc are often overlooked when giving motivating examples of its use. | 18:15:41 |
| Dominic Mills | And that is the biggest impediment to Nix adoption | 18:16:11 |
 pennae | should we wait for roberth to look at nixos ¬docbook or just send it and go on to nixpkgs? | 18:25:51 |
|  toonn changed their profile picture. | 20:48:32 |
| toonn | DominicMills: Those seem like implementation details that are uninteresting as motivating examples though? Except for binary caches. | 21:45:52 |
| toonn | Why would a potential user care about derivations, for example? | 21:46:20 |
| toonn | I think I don't even do and I'm already sold on Nix. | 21:46:44 |
| Dominic Mills | I'm a software developer and care about derivations. I believe many software developers would care about creating their own derivations for whatever projects they work on. This is especially true for complex polyglot projects that would otherwise have a number of moving parts without "packing" them into a derivation. Moreover, creating derivations for your own projects comes with a number of benefits such as package deployment and distribution, dependency management and versioning and isolation for testing purposes, which would be useful for a large of subset of software development teams. I find it interesting that out of all topics I mentioned you picked derivations to criticise, since it is arguably has the most utility compared to everything else that I've listed. | 22:15:28 |
| Dominic Mills | * I'm a software developer and I care about derivations. I believe many software developers would care about creating their own derivations for whatever projects they work on. This is especially true for complex polyglot projects that would otherwise have a number of moving parts without "packing" them into a derivation. Moreover, creating derivations for your own projects comes with a number of benefits such as package deployment and distribution, dependency management and versioning and isolation for testing purposes, which would be useful for a large of subset of software development teams. I find it interesting that out of all topics I mentioned you picked derivations to criticise, since it is arguably has the most utility compared to everything else that I've listed. | 23:29:43 |
| Dominic Mills | * The most illuminating piece of exposition that I've seen was this Reddit post that gave me a good understanding of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/13ye3lg/what_are_the_advantages_of_using_flakes/ | 23:30:44 |
| Dominic Mills | * For the longest time I couldn't understand what flakes were and what utility it provided over using a nix shell. | 23:30:49 |
| 19 Jun 2023 |
 j-k | toonn might be talking about raw derivations rather than builders like stdenv.mkDerivation which is what a developer is much more likely to use | 08:49:09 |
| asymmetric | I like this explanation of the build process, would be nice if we could have something similar on nix.dev https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36388251 | 08:59:52 |
| toonn | I'm talking about derivations, which are the product of something like a call to mkDerivation and contains the concrete information Nix uses to build something. I didn't know DominicMills was using the term for package and shell expressions. | 21:18:03 |
| toonn | Just a problem of terminology. Which should definitely be a consideration for the docs though : ) | 21:19:46 |
| pennae | don't the docs call everything derivations? especially the pills | 21:20:13 |
| 20 Jun 2023 |
 Alex | In reply to @pennae:matrix.eno.space
don't the docs call everything derivations? especially the pills Because everything is a derivation.
Using a different word for derivations in Nix code vs derivations in the Nix store would probably be even more confusing. | 01:56:26 |
