Nix Office hours

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9

@tomberek thank you so much for the session. It has been really helpful.

I needed to use a uuid for the luks device. I ended up writing it to a file at the end of the setup process which I read using initrd.luks.devices.root.device = (builtins.readFile ./uuid_boot);

I also discovered that I cannot use dev/disk/by-label with LVM, but I can use dev/<lvm_vg_name>/<lvm_volume_name> instead.

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10

@tomberek you don’t happen to know anything about packaging go applications, do you? If so, I would love to take advantage of your generous offer next time you’re available.

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11

Last night @tomberek messaged me and we had an office hours session. It was great :+1: Tom was very helpful and worked through a relatively difficult packaging problem with me. Thanks again for all your efforts and help Tom.

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12

Had a few more sessions. Some trends:

  • interest in flakes
  • NixOS install (partitioning, ZFS, LUKS)
  • half-hour isn’t quite enough to solve more complex problems, bumping it up to allocate an hour.

Generally seems like the concept of holding office hours is fun and productive. Feel free to put something on the schedule for this weekend.

I’ve also got a “reverse office hours” request if anyone is good with Hydra. I’m getting problems on master branch when using a distributed builder. Local-only works fine.

Apr 02 06:44:20 perkeep hydra-queue-runner[11130]: will retry ‘/nix/store/sls5ybh8w7a8j05djvl0b53wc6k15w99-name.drv’ after 14588s
Apr 02 06:44:20 perkeep hydra-queue-runner[11130]: uncaught exception building ‘/nix/store/sls5ybh8w7a8j05djvl0b53wc6k15w99-name.drv’ on ‘root@3.333.111.94’: std::bad_alloc
Apr 02 06:44:20 perkeep hydra-queue-runner[11130]: marking step 6 of build 4486 as orphaned
Apr 02 06:44:20 perkeep hydra-queue-runner[11130]: outputs of ‘/nix/store/sls5ybh8w7a8j05djvl0b53wc6k15w99-name.drv’ substituted or already valid on ‘root@3.333.111.94’
Apr 02 06:44:19 perkeep hydra-queue-runner[11130]: performing step ‘/nix/store/sls5ybh8w7a8j05djvl0b53wc6k15w99-name.drv’ 1 times on ‘root@3.333.111.94’ (needed by build 4486 and 0 others)
Apr 02 05:24:46 perkeep hydra-queue-runner[11130]: cleaning orphaned step 5 of build 4486
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13

I think this is a great initiative! I’m curious if there’s any interest in videoing/streaming these sessions? I would def need interested in watching, and I imagine there’s some golden nuggets of wisdom in there for the rest of us mere mortals.

14

Recently had an office hour with @tomberek .

We talked about:

One very cool thing about the session is that @tomberek did a great job at driving the discussion: despite the fact that I had only a couple of specific questions, he was able to clarify things, and gave me pointers to help me understand nixos better (in particular, I was willing to understand nixos/pam: rework of the entire module by rissson · Pull Request #105319 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub).

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15

Hey! That’s my PR! I’d be happy to walk you through it, there’s quite a lot going on.

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16

I think too many people turns the meeting into more of a general discussion and less specific focus on solving the issue. I value the 1-on-1 approach as being very effective at addressing problems. Perhaps 2-on-1 for issues that cross several subjects.

IRC is sometimes used in a similar way, but it can be hard to coordinate and you often have too many questions for too few answers.

Another approach would be to have a common time to meet, but then break out into individual sessions for specific issues.

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17

Yeah, our one on one session was very effective so I agree :+1:

18

These sound like a great way to reach out, thank you for doing it. If you’re still doing them I’d love to chat sometime. The calendar seems full for now though.

19

I can do some this afternoon.

20

Other priorities mean that I struggle to see when I might find time to think about Nix, for quite a few weeks to come. However, when time allows, I would like to understand how to get this

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/development/libraries/physics/geant4

to work on MacOS. I do not use MacOS myself, nor do I have access to a machine running it, though I have managed to spin up a VM which allows a fair degree of experimentation. I got hopelessly lost when trying to understand the interaction between XCode and Nix in general, and this package in particular.

Is this something that would make good material for discussion in your Nix Office Hours?

21

Tom and I just talked for a few hours about a problem I’ve been trying to overcome - cross compilation with darwin as the target. We didn’t get to a solution, but we did explore several avenues that look promising, including virtualization and remote builders.

He also gave me a few names of other Nixers who might be able to help more.

We also talked about some ideas and projects we’ve both been working on involving nix as a build system (rather than a package manager), and he explained Nomia to me so I finally understand what it’s about.

Big thanks to Tom for using his time for this.

22

@tomberek Are you still hosting these? Would definitely appreciate some help if/when you are available!

23

I am. Just finished one up. Feel free to throw another on at some point. Scheduling is dynamic.

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24

Thanks again, @tomberek. This was incredibly helpful!

roni

25

Doors are open for this weekend!

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26

I’ve got an available weekend to do some hours.

I’m also interested in hacking on an alternate store backend, Hydra, or content-addressability if anyone wants to pair program or just hang out.

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27

“alternate store backend”, ooh, I’m a bit intrigued, can you say more?

28

Thanks for this great initiative, I’m hoping to have an interaction about nix and gain some knowledge from experienced folks. Sent an invite with more details.