[Nix-dev] The Church of Suckless NixOS is looking for followers

[Jan Malakhovski]

Adrien Devresse <Adev at adev.name> writes:

>> Note that NixOS FreeBSD/NetBSD is just SLNOS with a different kernel,
>> because we are gonna to be free from glibc and GNU tools.
>
> I am sorry in advance for this comment.
>
> But I can only get amused of seeing some GNU, Linux and systemD-haters 
> spitting on C++ and software complexity on their main website 
> (http://suckless.org/sucks/) and on the other side using Nix, the most 
> complex package manager up to date, coded in C++, for their main 
> packaging system.
>
>
> Just for the troll : Do you also plan to redo also Nix entirely in C, 
> like everything else, just for fun ?

Firstly, we have no formal relationship with suckless.org. We like their
tools. But we also like other tools. I can't live without GHC on my
laptop, but it takes like 1.5Gb, but I get a lot of use out of those
1.5Gb. (I would love for it to me smaller, though.)

Meanwhile, 22Mb glibc and 19Mb systemd (disregarding some major crazy
design decisions there even, did you try to read the source?) are a huge
drag for a system that, when build using other tools, normally fits into
16Mb of flash.

Of course we have some strong religious feelings, and we are having fun,
but, in all seriousness, having an option to use saner tools in NixOS
produces more goodies for everyone. Think "NixBSD", "NixWRT" or "NixSensor",
you can't have any of those with systemd and GNU tools, and having a separate
distributions for those is anticlimactic.

Secondly,

$ du -csh $(nix-store -qR /nix/store/ci3asdl0my2s85ifi8790lpimk8rm47s-nix-1.11.7) | sort --reverse -h
102M	total
47M	/nix/store/pbs5sfnp9bfv27vz9m7h64w3zgkavfqd-perl-5.22.2
22M	/nix/store/68sa3m89shpfaqq1b9xp5p1360vqhwx6-glibc-2.25
11M	/nix/store/5lfwsx1nkrcqp7p24qr8z4wiwfxx5idv-coreutils-8.26
4.7M	/nix/store/baidkxp1dsb5varjq06b5jsjf2a33hc1-gcc-5.4.0-lib
3.4M	/nix/store/a0lxvniz27b5gn86qnn4n1riwhwfs3q1-openssl-1.0.2k
3.0M	/nix/store/ci3asdl0my2s85ifi8790lpimk8rm47s-nix-1.11.7
2.5M	/nix/store/gda77bzdgyp6ifd0wvbb95k8kr0vbhvi-gnutar-1.29
1.8M	/nix/store/9cd2qfysx5yg5yzb3fc6sslz2k0c07aw-perl-DBI-1.636
1.2M	/nix/store/010yd8jls8w4vcnql4zhjbnyp2yay5pl-bash-4.4-p5
1.1M	/nix/store/d34xiny1zqd2igm6rflfsc9z0ph5nmrl-sqlite-3.17.0
772K	/nix/store/7cnbgg33i3ajvfgnv3iyya17am9qifmw-libatomic_ops-7.4.4
624K	/nix/store/lm3c0zxszwj844j48sxmx28lx5x042i0-openssl-1.0.2k-bin
...

Dropping perl from there would be nice (and nix repo seems to move in
that direction anyway), but the rest is exactly our point.

Cheers,
  Jan and Co