- Previous meeting notes
- Attendees: @zmitchell @khaled @infinisil @henrik-ch
- Notes taken by: @infinisil
Notes
- Hired editorial lead, waiting for feedback
- Talk about suggestions in @fricklerhandwerk’s post
- 2023-05-18 - Learning Journey Working Group - Meeting Notes #9 - #2 by fricklerhandwerk
- Essentially suggesting bottom-up instead of top-down
- Let’s read this and then discuss it
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@infinisil: Discussing it won’t help, reference is needed, tutorials are needed
- @khaled: Agree
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@zmitchell: Yeah, at some point we just have to agree on a path and take it, but one thought:
- Building up a single project makes it hard to show certain corners of Nix
- The Rust book instead builds up knowledge over time rather than building a project over time so it doesn’t have that problem
- @infinisil: I like the building up knowledge idea, then each tutorial should be more self-contained. But can have multiple tutorials, main one to build up knowledge, another one for a project
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@zmitchell:
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nix-shell -ptutorials stays the same -
shell.nixone is self-contained - Python dependencies one might be too specific
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- If we’re going for the self-contained one, we can do more polyglot ones, showing multiple languages
- E.g. like https://floxdev.com/docs/getting-started/install-flox/ where you have tabs to pick approaches
- @infinisil: Knowledge shouldn’t be under tabs, should be general, but maybe examples could be like this
- @zmitchell: Maybe a flat list of common builders, link to the nixpkgs manual for more details and more complete listings
- @henrik-ch: The flox example is very good, maybe a too high bar, too many things. Maybe we can just write a bunch of tutorials and then tie it together more afterwards
- @khaled: More important is giving an explanation why the approaches are different, what the packages do, how the paths get assembled
- @infinisil: Agree, instead of e.g. saying “to use cmake add cmake to nativeBuildInputs”, explain setup hooks, how to use them, how they work, how to inspect them
- @henrik-ch: Let’s start with Python to not lose ourselves in branching
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@zmitchell: Maybe we need a tutorial just for
PATH, what software is available can be magical. This way we can explain stuff like setup hooks, nix-shell, and Python as well- @infinisil: Sounds good, should we sketch this?
- @khaled: Explain general things, use language-specific stuff for examples
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@infinisil: Sketching a path tutorial issue: Learning Journey tutorial: `PATH` and `PATH`-like variables · Issue #571 · NixOS/nix.dev · GitHub
- @infinisil: Note that there’s not much PATH-specific stuff in Nix
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@khaled: More generally environment variables, too detailed for a PATH tutorial?
- @khaled: Managing environment variables is the more general concept
- (…)
- @infinisil: Filesystem and environment variables are both unix process concepts, but most people have a good intuition about the filesystem, so environment variables should still be covered
- @khaled: Filesystem would be interesting too, where Nix puts stuff, etc.
- @infinisil: Many people might have the intuition that e.g. /bin is for packages, but really anything works if PATH is right, could be hashed paths, leading to Nix
- @khaled: Important idea is that Nix can be for any language
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@zmitchell:
PATHtutorial should be aboutPATH-like environment variables, don’t explain environment variables generally -
@infinisil: Do we really need a
PATHtutorial? - @henrik-ch: Let’s just write it and figure out later where it goes
Action items
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@zmitchell: Create a tracking issue for the set of a tutorials we’ve decided on
- This will be the source of truth for which tutorials we’ve decided to work on for easier lookup
- @zmitchell: Create issues for each tutorial we’ve decided on, link in tracking issue