Tweag + Nix dev update #7

thufschmitt · February 16, 2021, 2:31pm

A short update from the Tweag Nix team for the last two weeks since our last update

Nix UX

@garbas has been opening a bunch of issues suggesting some UX improvements to Nix. Some of them have already been fixed, others are still waiting or in discussion. You can see them with the UX tag on the github tracker.
@thufschmitt also started implementing an evaluation cache for flakes. The work isn’t over yet, but preliminary benchmarks show that this can bring some huge improvements (From veeery slow to instantaneous in some pathological cases, around 400% faster in more reasonable scenarios) at the cost of a small slowdown for uncached evaluations:

evaluation caching benchmark1680×967 19 KB
@edolstra moved forward the documentation effort, improving the manpages (36c4d6, 807d963)

@garbas opened two pull requests to add a blog section and rework the commercial provider page
@garbas also fixed some issues with the new faceted search

@adisbladis has been doing some important background work towards the 2.0 release of NixOps. In particular he got a pre-release version into nixpkgs for early-adopters, and led a meeting with some stakeholders to concretize the design of the new state backend system.

@yannham continues his work on the Nickel configuration language:

He wrote an introductory blog post on contracts, which is the fundamental ingredient for both data validation and (gradual) typing in Nickel.
As Nix, the Nickel interpreter now detects direct infinite recursion.
Type inference outside of statically typed code has been improved a bit.
Nickel can now export to YAML and TOML, in addition to JSON. Moreover, one can also import JSON, YAML or TOML directly as a Nickel value.
The list type is now parametric, which makes it more expressive.

@adisbladis recorded a new compositional.fm episode with @garbas explaining the rationale behind it. A must-hear if you want to know more on software trusting and how Nix can help with it.

@edolstra merged and then reverted a change to the the way nars are stored in the binary caches
@garbas added a stale bot to the Nix repository to help triaging the issues
@infinisil opened an hydra PR to fix the github status badge

Ninlives · February 16, 2021, 3:57pm

Does NixOps 2.0 supports building from a flake?

adisbladis · February 18, 2021, 2:06pm

Yes it does.

The exact implementation is not yet finalised and is changed in Example NixOps State Backends by grahamc · Pull Request #1264 · NixOS/nixops · GitHub to only allow deploying from a local flake.nix, but not a remote Flake URI.