Are you importing things from all over the internet, without pinning to a specific version? It sounds a lot like it, at least, and in that case I'm not sure how this is a flaw of Nix, or how it would be much different in other places.
Nix channels (and NIX_PATH) break reproducibility. Pinning revisions makes things more robust; my preferred approach is to use default function arguments, so they're easy to override (useful when composing lots of things together).
It seems like flakes are another way to do that, but they seem way too over-complicated for my taste.
Yeah of course, but channels probably shouldn't be used outside of managing the local machine, and there's usually quite long and fair time period for deprecation warnings taking effect.
Not sure how bad if one uses unstable, but if using unstable the complaint isn't really fair to begin with.
Hate it (using the Firefox one). The look is weird, seems to waste space. New copy button sucks. I spent 10 minutes one day not being able to login with a copied password, bit realising it was because I was lacking the second click. Also the new suggested results (when searching) honestly just gets in the way, since the order of the results are not always the same anymore.
I think the value proposition holds when you are just getting started with your company and you happen to employ people that know their way around the hyperscaler cloud ecosystems.
But I agree that moving your own infra or outsourcing operations when you have managed to do it on your own for a while is most likely misguided. Speaking from experience it introduces costs that cannot possibly be calculdated before the fact and thus always end up more complicated and costlier than the suits imagined.
In the past, when similar decicions were made, I always thought to myself: You could have just hired one more person bringing their own, fresh perspective on what we are doing in order to improve our ops game.
Oh, I've seen this before and it's true in an anecdotal sense for me. One reason why is that they always think of hiring an additional developer as a cost, never savings.
Hammer meet nail. I currently work in a more traditional "ops" team with our cloud infrastructure dictated by development (through contract hires at first, and now a new internal DevOps team). It's mind boggling how poorly they run things. It goes so deep it's almost issues at product design stage. There's now a big project to move the responsibility back into our team because it's not fit for purpose.
I think an operations background gives you a strong ability to smell nonsense and insecurity. The DevOps team seems to be people who want to be 'developers' rather than people who care about 'ops'. Yaml slinging without thinking about what the yaml actually means.
Sure, but tell me: How often do you see NixOS used as a file server, enterprise app server, in the cloud, as a web server, for big databases, email server, backup server, firewall, satellite server, in labs, banking, or critical mission servers? The answer is clear—hardly anyone uses NixOS in those roles unless it's for something experimental.
We use it for a huge part of our infrastructure. 3000+ pods running on an on-premise K8s cluster, with most supporting services and systems also running on NixOS. We could never have done what we do, with the manpower we have, with something like Debian+ansible.
I should have be more attentive (and up to date), that is impressive. I hope those allegations are false, no amount of progress can justify such lack of respect for the life of a primate.
Not even helping every human who lost the use of some or the whole of their body? Isn't being locked into your body for the rest of your life torture as well?
