Hi Profpatsch, >> I hardly ever use nix-shell and I don't want to, to be honest. > > Why is that?
1. I don't need it. Adding those Haskell/Python/LaTeX/R modules that I need into my global user environment works just fine. I suppose there might be occasions where versions conflict in a way that makes it impossible to add them into the same environment, but I haven't actually encountered that problem yet. Since I don't need more than one shell environment, I don't have to bother will shell.nix files, and I don't have to remember which open shell window is running which environment either. 2. nix-shells don't nest. And even if they would, many things you'll define inside of a nix-shell won't nest. Thus, you cannot easily compose shell environments, which makes it hard to define accurate environments in a modular and re-usable fashion. 3. nix-shell interacts poorly with long-running processes. I work on all my projects with Emacs, but I don't want to start Emacs inside of a nix-shell created for one particular project. My Emacs is up and running from the moment I log in and then I don't ever quit it unless I absolutely have to. So having a proper build environment in "some other window" isn't very useful to me. I want to compile by hitting C-c C-c or C-c C-l. 4. When I update my copy of the Nixpkgs repository, I run "nix-env -u --always" and afterwards everything I'll need to work on all of my projects is available locally in my /nix store. If I see that Nix needs to compile hundreds of packages to do the update, then I may or may not decide to postpone the update. When using nix-shell, I won't know whether it needs to compile for an hour until I've actually run it, i.e. I'll notice that I can't start hacking on some project only after I've decided I want to do that. With one global environment, I have that information for all my projects at the time I decide whether to update or not. 5. The default nix-shell prompt in bash does not distinguish between "root" and normal users. ;-) Having said all that, I believe that nix-shell is genuinely useful and I do use it every now and then. I wouldn't want to get along without it. I just wouldn't want to use it as much as some people apparently do. Best regards, Peter _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
