VIvishvananda·Feb 23, 2018Recommendation phrase
I have been using nix for a while to build binary packages for crashcart[1] and I really love the premise of isolated source-based builds.
Unfortunately, over time I've become quite frustrated with the pull-everything from the internet model. If you are building packages from scratch each time instead of pulling down cached version using the nix command, the build breaks quite often.
Mostly it is silly stuff like the source package disappearing from the net. A particularly egregious offender is the named.root[2] file being updated, which will cause everything to fail to build until the sha is updated in the build def.
I don't know that there is a great solution for this problem. Maybe there needs to be a CI system that does from scratch build of all of the packages every day and automatically files bugs. Alternatively, a cache of sources
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and not just built packages could ease the pain. This issue probably affects ver few nix users, but it has demoted my love of nix down to "still likes but is somewhat annoyed by".
[1]: https://github.com/oracle/crashcart
[2]: https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root