[Nix-dev] How do you work on big packages?

[Kosyrev Serge]

Dmitry Kalinkin writes:
>  On 17 Mar 2017, at 17:44, Vladimír Čunát <vcunat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  I do believe the intention was for "SW distribution" etc, at least
>  primarily, and the suitability for development is a by-product due to
>  some properties, e.g. easy (non-)mixing of development and stable
>  versions/configs. Marc can surely remember the earlier days of NixOS.
>
> So nix has “nix copy” functionality to do the distribution part. But the rest of the nix system allows to describe a
> relatively general computation process in Unix-like environment. I use nix derivations to run a numerical
> calculation code and store intermediate steps in outputs. I imagine, there are some “SW distribution”-oriented
> users facing more resistance when using nix than me doing my thing. I also think that the nix/NixOS community
> will have lots of people who appreciate generality of nix as a tool.
>
>  It's even possible to use nix-build instead of make to compile
>  individual files, but there it just doesn't seem to be very suitable…
>
> Yes. Like https://github.com/edolstra/nix-make . I wonder what didn’t work out.

Garbage management becomes complicated from a human perspective, I guess.

Perhaps, Nix could adopt a generational GC approach, to avoid mixing
long-lived packages-related-files and short-lived build-related files..

-- 
с уважениeм / respectfully,
Косырев Сергей
--
“Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.”
  -- Frank Herbert, Children of Dune