Comparing Nix and Conda

[domenkozar]

@danieldk

With conda or plain old pip, you are up and running in a few seconds.

I’m not following this, why is our policy not to distribute those, while pip and conda can? We do have unfreeRedistributable for such cases.

builds of some libraries frequently fail, because there are still some pre-SSE4.2 machines in the Hydra cluster .

This can be mitigated by either using some of the existing machine features such as big-parallel or we add another one like SSE42 to skip such hardware.

@teh

But I know that one of our competitors tried nix and it was universally reviled:

The good news all of these are solvable problems! The biggest unknown is windows support, the rest is something we’re making progress on.

@teh

IMO the last point is probably the most important. Just dumping nix on a team will almost certainly fail, but being there and helping with whatever weird situation people get stuck in could work. If you can’t provide that go with conda.

I agree, the biggest blocker for Nix adoption is that knowledge spreads from person to person rather through text, audio or video.