| 9 Jul 2023 |
|  Bruno Rodrigues joined the room. | 14:54:58 |
| 10 Jul 2023 |
| Bruno Rodrigues | Hi all, I’m Bruno and am interested in Nix to set up reproducible development environments for R (my main language, but am curious for any language whatsoever). I’m thinking about Nix to essentially replace {renv} + Docker (and maybe even {targets}) | 10:19:22 |
| Bruno Rodrigues | for now I’m reading the Nix pills and trying some things out | 10:19:34 |
 Gaétan Lepage | In reply to @trexd:matrix.org
Well currently updating flax is marked as broken on nixpkgs because it requires orbax to be built. I've started packaging orbax; however it requires a newer version of Jax than what is currently available on nixpkgs. Seems like people are working on it over here https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/227145 but it's stalled because of the changes breaking a lot of packages. I was wondering what the best way to insert myself in this process to help out in getting an update to jax merged so I can fix the state of the flax pacakge. Hi ! I'm the dumb guy at the origin of this PR.
Indeed, we are struggling hard to get this through. A lot of problems have been tackled already. First and foremost, all of the packages (jax, jaxlib, jaxlibWithCuda) build fine now.
However, a few existing packages are broken by this update.
There are only 2: numpyro and tensorflow-datasets. | 13:18:52 |
| Gaétan Lepage | I am only targetting 0.4.12 with this PR because 0.4.13 brings yet new issues (related to jax's dependencies) | 13:19:34 |
| Gaétan Lepage | Honestly, it is kind of a nightmare ^^ | 13:19:49 |
 trexd | Yeah it seems like it. Ya'll are doing excellent work though :D | 17:45:14 |
 peddie | welcome! I've had some luck (with jbedo's help) setting up R development environments with flakes in the past year. feel free to ping me about it; I think nix is underused in the R world! | 22:11:53 |
| 11 Jul 2023 |
| Bruno Rodrigues | thanks peddie! actually I was exactly going to be asking this: should I use flakes for this? and another question: have you written down some of this into a guide ? | 05:31:26 |
 jbedo | the decision to use flakes is orthogonal to R, i use it and find it useful but it does have limitiations and are somewhat controversial | 05:39:21 |
| jbedo | regardless of using flakes or not, focusing on understanding core nix will go a long way | 05:43:30 |
| peddie | I've not written much down as it's just what I have managed to scrape together, and I don't have any blog or commit bits to nixpkgs. but there are examples in projects on github, like https://github.com/peddie/solar-api/blob/master/flake.nix | 05:55:52 |
| peddie | as to whether you should use flakes: not really sure, I just happened to go that route | 05:56:25 |
| Bruno Rodrigues | very interesting thanks! I’m still in exploration phase, and am reading lots of docs currently. Already managed to drop into a nix interactive shell with R and some packages. But I’m looking more into it to see if I could build some R package that would make it easy to essentially set up, for each new project one starts, an dev environment using nix | 06:42:52 |
| Bruno Rodrigues | yesterday I read about flakes, so I was wondering if and what was the consensus on them :) | 06:43:36 |
| Bruno Rodrigues | what would you say is the biggest benefit of using flakes over not using them? | 06:44:02 |
