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  • Kogasa
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    1 year ago

    Isn’t it immutable? That’s a pretty big difference in itself

    edit: Thank you for the replies, I’ll have to learn more!

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      No, Nix isn’t actually immutable. It runs packages in isolation, but they can still affect your file system.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      it sort of is. The whole thing is made of what’s in /nix and it sets read-only attributes to all of it. You can modify it however you like by simply rebuilding it with updated configuration and you can switch at runtime or reboot.

      • @SomeOtherUsername
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        11 year ago

        How does stuff that’s not made specifically for nix discover it? E.g. how would gcc find the libraries it needs in /nix?

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          I’m not super adcanced in it and you beter off referring to NixOS docs to learn about it specifically, but trying to answer your question, it creates symbolic links of libs or binaries and manipulates PATH, LD_PATH and others. Some packages will also have speciall wrapper scripts that prepare the environment for a binary to run.

          The downside is that you can’t just run Linux binary directly when it’s dynamically linked and you need to use what’s in the repo or use special overlay to imitate FHS

          • @SomeOtherUsername
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            11 year ago

            Got it, thanks 😁 I was looking for this kind of a tldr answer

            • @[email protected]
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              11 year ago

              To add on, every single package is manually defined and set in the PATH inside the derivation (which is what packages software in Nix).