| 4 Feb 2024 |
 Pratham Patel | I understand your intensions but come to think of it, if you're using nix to manage your entire system, it's NixOS ;) | 16:49:54 |
| Pratham Patel | You'll eventually turn Debian into NixOS with your intended project | 16:50:09 |
 Janik (they/them) | In reply to @sujayj:matrix.org
Yes that would be much better but through this method people would not need to change their entire OS and could try out nix easily and switch to nix gradually. May I introduce you to the magical world of 🌈 Virtual Machines 🌈 | 16:51:27 |
 eldios (Lele) | Sometimes you can't change the underlying OS as much as you HAVE to use Mac. So I do understand the intention Sujay.
Basically you're trying to use Nix as ansible.
Makes sense to me and seems like an interesting experiment.
Not sure how much traction it would have. | 16:52:37 |
| eldios (Lele) | VMs won't work if I understood the use case | 16:53:08 |
| Pratham Patel | I think Janik means to try NixOS in a VM while dailying Debian | 16:53:32 |
| Janik (they/them) | I know it's not as graduale as they would like and vms don't run everywhere but I would consider it good enough to try nixos. | 16:53:52 |
| eldios (Lele) | Aaaaah in that case, good idea 💡 | 16:53:58 |
| Janik (they/them) | I get the appeal of the solution you are suggesting, but it has a lot of drawbacks, like conflicting state management of services, the distro has to use systemd otherwise it won't work at all, selecting generations at boot time won't be possible. | 16:56:36 |
| Janik (they/them) | a bit offtopic, IIRC their is some people working on using the NixOS module system with other unix kernels like freebsd. | 16:57:50 |
| Janik (they/them) | In reply to @sujayj:matrix.org
Hello everyone, so we were looking into nix-darwin and how it is implemented , we want to create similar projects to bring declarative and reproducible package management and system configurations to debian systems first and then hopefully branch out to other linux distros as well, and since nothing like nix-debian exists now, possibly due to the various distribution specific details, package managers and system service management tools, is it viable to atleast start working on a specific distro (i.e nix-debian) ? if not please elaborate . fwiw devenv has some support for it https://devenv.sh/services/ | 16:59:25 |
| Pratham Patel | Let's say that you're this proposed tool to manage systemd services on Debian. If you run a binary from here that is from the nix store, well now you need to mont /nix in the initramfs unconditionally since there might be some services that start with the initramfs. At which point, you're doing what NixOS does with stage1 and stage2 (not exactly but very similar). | 17:00:01 |
| Pratham Patel | *that you're using this proposed tool | 17:00:16 |
| Janik (they/them) | In reply to @sujayj:matrix.org
Hello everyone, so we were looking into nix-darwin and how it is implemented , we want to create similar projects to bring declarative and reproducible package management and system configurations to debian systems first and then hopefully branch out to other linux distros as well, and since nothing like nix-debian exists now, possibly due to the various distribution specific details, package managers and system service management tools, is it viable to atleast start working on a specific distro (i.e nix-debian) ? if not please elaborate . * fwiw devenv has some support for it https://devenv.sh/services/ (not at system level) | 17:00:35 |
| Pratham Patel | Janik, do we have any proposed projects for Nix/NixOS? | 17:08:58 |
| Janik (they/them) | currently just the idea i submitted https://github.com/NixOS/GSoC2024/blob/main/ideas.md but we gonna reach the minimum, peter hoeg said he is gonna submit two more this evening, and I'll submit one more tomrrow before sending the org application to google. | 17:10:46 |
| Pratham Patel | Thanks, I'll take a look tomorrow morning. | 17:13:09 |
|  tomberek joined the room. | 22:03:52 |
| tomberek | It would be great to have help clarifying the dynamic derivation use-case of automatic incremental builds. | 22:05:15 |
| Janik (they/them) | In reply to @tomberek:matrix.org
It would be great to have help clarifying the dynamic derivation use-case of automatic incremental builds. Would you be willing to mentor the idea :D | 22:49:26 |
| eldios (Lele) | I was thinking of expanding the docs with more starter templates both for pure nix conf and flake based.
Not a huge task, but interesting for new comers, instead of relying on random people's conf which often is more convoluted than needed (especially initially). | 23:21:09 |
| eldios (Lele) | * I was thinking of proposing of expanding the docs with more starter templates both for pure nix conf and flake based.
Not a huge task, but interesting for new comers, instead of relying on random people's conf which often is more convoluted than needed (especially initially). | 23:21:19 |
| eldios (Lele) | * I was thinking of proposing expanding the docs with more starter templates both for pure nix conf and flake based.
Not a huge task, but interesting for new comers, instead of relying on random people's conf which often is more convoluted than needed (especially initially). | 23:21:27 |
| 5 Feb 2024 |
| tomberek | Yes. | 01:47:32 |
| Pratham Patel | What kind of templates do you have in mind? I'm a Nix newb but have written technical articles/how-tos/guides on itsfoss.com, maybe I can help if I understand the task better :) | 02:20:08 |
|  getpsyched joined the room. | 07:42:45 |
| eldios (Lele) | @Pratham Patel (you can mention me) I was thinking of some “ready-to-use” examples to be added to the installation docs or as a subsequent step so that people configuring their nix/nixOS setup for the first time would have a sane, solid base to start from.
Though from what I got mentors are supposed to propose ideas, but then students are supposed to take on ‘em and then be the actual “doers" | 15:02:53 |
| Pratham Patel | In reply to @eldios:chat.lele.rip
@Pratham Patel (you can mention me) I was thinking of some “ready-to-use” examples to be added to the installation docs or as a subsequent step so that people configuring their nix/nixOS setup for the first time would have a sane, solid base to start from.
Though from what I got mentors are supposed to propose ideas, but then students are supposed to take on ‘em and then be the actual “doers" Oh, so you mean, for X usecase, here's the starting template and for Y, this is what you use and here's another template for Z. Correct? | 15:58:18 |
| Pratham Patel | And, I assume these templates should be merged in NixOS/templates? | 15:59:58 |
| eldios (Lele) | the main entrypoint should be the initial docs that new users touch (IMO the installation docs)… where the templates live I guess is just debatable based on how they should be used | 16:19:29 |
