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Principal Skinner on Immutable Distros
(infosec.pub)
Am I out of touch?
No, it's the forward-thinking generation of software engineers that want elegant, reliable, declarative systems that are wrong.
Sorry I'm too stupid to understand this joke. Someone explain?
We've known since the 1950s that our configurations should be declarative, to make them resilient to necessary changes to our software stack.
Instead of coding exactly what change needs made, we ought to write a config that declares the intended outcome, and then do extra work to write code that correctly interprets that config. This way when all the commands we used stop working (and they do!), we still know the original intent of the configuration.
But making config management declarative is a lot of work. So fuck that noise. I'll do it in bash, instead, again.
Nix actually IS Bash under the hood. It uses Perl and Bash to create an atomic installation. I tend to do a LOT less maintenance than I’d need to do if I rolled everything from scratch in Bash.
That explains why Nix despite being parallelized takes a long time to install packages and rebuild the configuration.