On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 12:18:08PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote: > It seems a little late to retitle this as being about NixOS, although > I'm going to address that. But since I'm not retitling, first off: > thanks everyone who replied about virtualization, this has been > educational. > > As for NixOS - after Jamon's mention of it a couple months ago, I > played with it for a bit and wrote up a rough review at > http://www.gilesorr.com/blog/nixos-review.html > > Some points for those who don't bother to follow the link: > - /bin/rm doesn't exist. "rm" does, and it's on the PATH, but imagine > how many scripts that breaks. > - vi isn't installed by default. this is a 838MB compressed image > they provided, and they didn't include the POSIX standard browser? > It's available as a package though. > - if a package is installed at the system level, the package manager > will still happily install the same package for an individual user. > > Think about this last point: the user will now be using their own > version of the package. System-wide security updates are totally out > the window. > > I see the flexibility NixOS offers, but I think the price is too high.
It is an interesting design that is trying to solve one problem, but does so by creating a bunch of other ones. It is not a tradeoff I would be willing to take. Certainly the problem it is trying to solve is not one that has ever really been an issue for me (the few times I have had a reason to use another version of something, I have installed it in a small chroot running an appropriate version of the distribution to run that version). -- Len Sorensen --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] http://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
