Neovim Plugin Development with Nix Flakes

Live broadcast from 10-24-2022.

#devops #programming #softwareengineering

[vpxc]

Docker can't really solve the non-determinism of Dockerfiles because it doesn't control the installation or update mechanisms of the Linux distros that serve as bases for its containers. The non-determinism of the average Dockerfile is inherited from the package managers that run on those distros, like apt or dnf or whatever. The versions of the packages which happen to be in the repos for those distros at any given moment is uncontrolled mutable state. For Docker to provide Nix-like determinism, they'd have to also mirror snapshots of the repos of all the distros they support. I don't think it's really feasible from an engineering or cost perspective.

But so much the better for Nix! If you need a Docker or OCI runtime because you're deploying to Kubernetes or Nomad or something, you can still get that reproducibility in your Docker images... if you build them with Nix. :)

Have you messed around with nix2container or Nixpkgs' dockerTools? My impatient ass is asking halfway through the stream, but it would be pretty interesting and cool if you converted lspcontainers to a set of minimal images with maximal sharing built by Nix. :D