"Keith" == Keith Wright via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
Keith, I hope you're staying cool!
John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
What a great meeting last week! A big shout out to Xavier for doing his presentation on NixOS! Hopefully Tim will be able to share the links to the slides and other info.
Yes, thank you. I would like to review the slides.
We talked about:
NixOS
- A tool and environment for building systems in a deterministic manner. Sorta like Ansible, or Puppet, or Chef, or Salt or cfengine (old school!) or Terraform.
I don't know what any of those are. I was comparing it to apt-get, rpm, yumm and, of course guix. I think I heard Xavier say something about teamwork between Nix and guix, which would be good because I don't think we need $2^n$ incompatible package managers.
So think of those tools listed above as the next step up in abstraction to managing groups of packages and entire system level configuration. So I use Ansible and I tell it to install a bunch of packages, and then ansible uses apt or dpkg to do the actual install. Ansible (or terraform, salt, chef, puppet, etc) are all tools for bringing systems into alignment with your specifications. They add/remove packages, make updates to configurations, etc. NixOS is more like apt and rpm, with the idea that (as I understand it) you have a much more reproducable set of packages that are cryptographically proveable to be the same. Not so much from a signed with a key, but more in the form of hashes that track state all the way back to the source package.
I looked up NixOS, expecting to see a lot of cartoons. Where did those cartoons come from and are they "official"?
I don't know. Maybe Xavier or somethinh with the slides can chime in here?
And what are the feelings of those who are remote?
I feel lumpy; like a cucumber.
LOL!
Were you able to follow along and enjoy the talk?
The first half-hour or so was near intolerable, but then the noise stopped and the camera stopped bouncing and all was good.
Yeah, the noise in the usual conference room was crazy. And I just found another tool which I think Xavier was using in his shell. Take a look at 'starship': https://starship.rs/ which I find funky because it requires you to have Nerdfonts (https://www.nerdfonts.com/) installed. Which honestly seems like a step backwards, just like Emojis are a step backward. Yes, it's fun to have and know the meaning (or supposed meaning!) of a special graphical image, but it really feels like we're going back to Egyptian Heiroglyphics. Which means you have to memorize hundreds or thousands of individual characters to make words. And then you still have to join them together into bigger chunks. The power of the Roman (or other smaller alphabets) to me is that you have a smaller number of pictographs or letters to know, which you can string together into larger concepts more easily. This is ignoring language and pronounciation issues of course. Ah well, enough ranting, it's gonna be another scorcher today, so stay cool everybody! John