friendlier
for beginners
#nixcon
Rok Garbas, @garbas
make Nix
friendlier ???
First Contact
Installing
Tooling
Documentation
Contributing
First Contact
https://nixos.org
Installing
curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
nixos-install should work without internet connection
Installing / 2
Bundling a stand-alone executable
$ mkdir nix
$ cat > nix/__main__.py << EOL
def main():
# TODO: do what https://nixos.org/nix/install bash script does !!!
print "Nix installed! We love you!"
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
EOL
$ wget http://url/to/nix.atr.gz
$ mv nix.tar.gz nix/
$ cd nix && zip -r ../nix.zip * && cd ..
$ echo '#!/usr/bin/env python' | cat - nix.zip > nix-installer
$ chmod +x nix-installer
$ ./nix-installer
Nix installed! We love you!Tooling
nix-env -i <pkg>
nix-env -iA <pkg>
nix install <pkg>
npm install <pkg>
brew install <pkg>
nix-env -e <pkg>
nix uninstall <pkg>
npm uninstall <pkg>
brew uninstall <pkg>
Tooling / 2
nix-env -qa \* | grep <pkg>
nix search <pkg>
npm search <pkg>
brew search <pkg>
nix-env -qi \* | grep <pkg>
nix list <pkg>
npm list <pkg>
brew list <pkg>
Tooling / 3
nix-env -u <pkg>
nix-env -uA <pkg>
nix upgrade <pkg>
npm upgrade <pkg>
brew upgrade <pkg>
ascii art
colors
emojis
Documentation
Lots of goodies in the Source
nixpks/lib is amazing resource to some helper functions in Nix, but you have to read the comments in the source code
Teach, don't tell
we need to have tutorials who teach
(alongside existing manual)
Documentation / 2
Kill the wiki !!!
“Well it’s a wiki, fix it yourself!”
Have you ever taken a class with multiple teachers at once?
Better to have no documentation then wrong documentation
Keeping your documentation in a wiki also makes it hard or impossible to keep it where it belongs: in version control right alongside your code.
Have you ever taken a class where there’s one jackass in the room who keeps constantly raising his hand and offering his own (often incorrect) opinions?
Contributing
How many active?
Contributing / 2
Automatically tag PR
Automatically assign
maintainers to review PR
Commiters should be invated to step away,
if not having enough time
Thank you
Rok Garbas, @garbas
Make Nix friendlier for Beginners
By Rok Garbas
Make Nix friendlier for Beginners
Nix concepts and ideas are revolutionary. All of us who use Nix/NixOS on daily basis understand how it works and why it works this way. But it took us quite some time to get here. Users just starting with Nix/NixOS are facing many problems, which range from Documentation, UX of our command line tools, Interacting with community, ... and many other areas. I would like to share my views how we can make Nix/NixOS friendlier to beginners without much effort.
