Comment by umanwizard
Comment by umanwizard 4 hours ago
What’s wrong with it? It’s a term of art that means a specific thing in both nix and guix; it’d just be confusing if zb renamed it to something else.
Comment by umanwizard 4 hours ago
What’s wrong with it? It’s a term of art that means a specific thing in both nix and guix; it’d just be confusing if zb renamed it to something else.
Yeah I ended up with the same issue. While I’m technically inclined, I’m not nearly to the point where I can handle the fire hose of (badly named) abstraction at all levels like some people.
I could never have pulled off what this guy did https://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2021/03/07/qubes-lite-with-kv..., though ironically his journal is probably one of the best “how nix actually works” tutorials I’ve ever seen, even though it isn’t intended for that or complete for such a purpose. He’s the only reason I know that a derivation is basically an intermediate build object.
"Derivation" refers to the nix intermediate build artifact, a .drv file, which contains the instructions to perform the build itself. Basically a nix program compiles to a derivation file which gets run to produce the build outputs. The hash in the /nix/store for a dependency is the hash of the derivation. Conveniently if the hash is already in a build cache, you can download the cached build outputs instead of building it yourself.
I'm 80% finished moving all of my servers from NixOS to Debian. I used NixOS for 3 years (even wrote some custom flakes) before finally giving up (for the final year I was just too scared to touch it, and then said "I shouldn't be scared of my OS"). I should know what "derivation" means, but I can't for the life of me remember...