I, too, have no desire to put so much work into having a working system (but I guess, there’s no way around nix for me, if I want to use haskell and ghcjs). Unfortunately from my own recent personal experience it does indeed have a steep learning curve .
I really like the general idea of nix, I think it’s going in the right direction and I am very grateful for all the people doing amazing work there and I wanted to give it a try for a long time, now.
But my recent experience with nix on MacOs has mostly just been incredibly frustrating. I started using nix one or two weeks ago, because I needed it for a project with haskell-miso (which I very much like, by the way).
As long as I just stuck to using the default.nix provided by Miso, everything worked fine, more or less, but as soon as I tried to go beyond that to customize things for the needs of my own project, the problems started to accumulate.
I needed to google for and apply manual fixes for some very basic things, because nix did not play well with neither macOS Catalina (nix needs access to /nix) nor with fish.
Some haskell packages I need like constructible were broken in the default channel and I had no idea how to fix those packages. In the end I ended up switching to a “stable” version. I do not understand why nixpgs-unstable is the default channel, by the way.
Sometimes things seem easy in some guides and I thought I understood them, but then when I tried them they just won’t work. For example I was hoping that
nix-shell -p 'haskell.packages.ghcjs.ghcWithPackages (pkgs: with pkgs; [ miso ])’
would give me a shell with the ghcjs compiler and the package miso, but that resulted in an error (after waiting for the result for quite some time and a lot of text scrolling by).
I tried following guides and didn’t try to do anything especially crazy, but somehow I ended up fucking up my haskell build environment so much, that I couldn’t do anything Haskell-related anymore. Still don’t how I managed to do that.
I tried rolling things back through
nix-env -G 1
but that didn’t work. Somehow the only think that helped me was deleting everything nix-related and trying again. I then switched away from the unstable channel in the very beginning and now things seem to somewhat work, more or less.
When I was 15 years younger I really enjoyed playing around with the configuration of my computer, trying different window managers and editors etc., but nowadays I have work I care about and limited time and I want my computer to just work and not get in the way. Nix really, really got in the way. It’s been incredibly frustrating the last few days, when I wanted to work on my project, but spent several days fighting with nix instead.
Sorry for the rant, again, I very much like the project and I really hope it succeeds, I just wanted to share my own experience with it, as a beginner.
I really like the general idea of nix, I think it’s going in the right direction and I am very grateful for all the people doing amazing work there and I wanted to give it a try for a long time, now.
But my recent experience with nix on MacOs has mostly just been incredibly frustrating. I started using nix one or two weeks ago, because I needed it for a project with haskell-miso (which I very much like, by the way).
As long as I just stuck to using the default.nix provided by Miso, everything worked fine, more or less, but as soon as I tried to go beyond that to customize things for the needs of my own project, the problems started to accumulate.
I needed to google for and apply manual fixes for some very basic things, because nix did not play well with neither macOS Catalina (nix needs access to /nix) nor with fish.
Some haskell packages I need like constructible were broken in the default channel and I had no idea how to fix those packages. In the end I ended up switching to a “stable” version. I do not understand why nixpgs-unstable is the default channel, by the way.
Sometimes things seem easy in some guides and I thought I understood them, but then when I tried them they just won’t work. For example I was hoping that
would give me a shell with the ghcjs compiler and the package miso, but that resulted in an error (after waiting for the result for quite some time and a lot of text scrolling by).I tried following guides and didn’t try to do anything especially crazy, but somehow I ended up fucking up my haskell build environment so much, that I couldn’t do anything Haskell-related anymore. Still don’t how I managed to do that.
I tried rolling things back through
but that didn’t work. Somehow the only think that helped me was deleting everything nix-related and trying again. I then switched away from the unstable channel in the very beginning and now things seem to somewhat work, more or less.When I was 15 years younger I really enjoyed playing around with the configuration of my computer, trying different window managers and editors etc., but nowadays I have work I care about and limited time and I want my computer to just work and not get in the way. Nix really, really got in the way. It’s been incredibly frustrating the last few days, when I wanted to work on my project, but spent several days fighting with nix instead.
Sorry for the rant, again, I very much like the project and I really hope it succeeds, I just wanted to share my own experience with it, as a beginner.