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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It does. it does to this. That’s the docker image not the docker file. You are confusing the spec with the artifact. If you want reproducible dev envs you use a system like compose or any rad of other tools to launch images from your artifact store.

    You use them, make sure they are always pristine and cleaned after use, don’t have network connectivity and other things that could affect the build.

    Or you could use Nix which builds everything this way.

    Notice that you mentioned additional systems to achieve that, you wouldn’t need them if docker was truly providing it.

    LOL. We always have this problem if you have people only using spec files and not the artifacts. You are comparing apples to oranges by comparing the dockerfile to a build rpm package. Let me help you:

    An rpm package == docker image
    An rpm .spec file == dockerfile

    You if you only give people spec files and have them rebuild the package you will get different hashes of the rpm file. Similarly you would likely not change your spec file between releases and know your rpm file is going to be different.

    But that’s the whole point. A developer wants spec file to ALWAYS generate the same artifact. And most devs even believe that and get frustrated when it doesn’t (like in your example).

    Nix basically solves that. It even removes the need for tools like artifactory, because there’s no longer need for it. The code fully defines the final binary. Of course you don’t want to rebuild everything every time, so a cache is introduced.

    Before you say that it is just renaming artifactory. It really isn’t. It actually works like a cache. I can remove any piece of it, and the missing pieces will be rebuild if they are needed. It is also used by the builder, so it doesn’t repeat itself. I especially like it when working on feature branch and it completes the code. I eventually merge it, and if my merge did not modify code it won’t waste time rebuilding the same thing.


  • I see that too. Despite what most people say they aren’t truly interested in learning new things (at least things that would force them out of their comfort zones).

    I mean if team tries to move out then there’s not much one can do.

    Maybe they can look into using some tooling that whole isn’t nix, it uses nix under the hood and still prices some benefits.

    I heard about DevBox and Flox. Those at least try to provide a reproducible dev environment (note, I haven’t used them myself as I feel that the abstraction they do places limits on nix functionality, but then others might see it as a benefit)

    I also am getting impression that as time progresses things are getting smoother over time. With poetry2nix for example the big problem are packages that depend on C libraries, as those are not specified as python dependencies, so poetry2nix has a override file which adds them.

    Previously I very frequently had to update and contribute new packages there. I was a bit away from python as was assigned to work on a Go project for half a year and now starting to work on another python project and when tried to use it and things just worked. All I had to do was to use latest poetry2nix and my project then compiled to a working container.


  • The dockerfile does not guarantee this, but the docker image or any OCI image does.

    That’s true, but also misleading.

    OCI image is like having an jpeg image. While Dockerfile is like the text prompt you write to ChatGPT to generate the image.

    Yes every time you look at the jpeg, it is the same exact image, but that’s kind of obvious, the real problem is if you try the text query to ChatGPT you will get something slightly different every time.

    Nix brings a true reproducibility. So in this analogy the same prompt brings the exact same image. This allows you to check on that prompt in your source control and if you mess up something there’s always a way back.

    This is something docker promised, but never delivered.

    Dockerfile should not be confused with the artifact.

    It should not, but artifacts never had problem with mutating before we had docker. If you generate an rpm package and store it in an artifactory it always was the same exact package (unless someone overwrote it, lol)

    Operationally we usually expect a dockerfile to be identical across many builds of different releases and know the artifact produced will have different code

    But that’s basically the problem docker claimed to fix. This is also the problem that you frequently encounter with a pipeline that worked fine one day suddenly stopped working next day, because something that your Dockerfile referenced changed (maybe a new image was updated that broke something, you can lock things to specific hashes, but you need to be very conscious about that and in the wild I never seen anyone really doing it).

    Anything you are doing with nix to make the lock files perfect is the same amount of work you’d be doing to any method of producing an OCI artifact.

    It is not. Hashes are and lock files are built-in and Nix uses them by default.

    If for example I use a flake, the flake.lock will hold the exact version of nixpkgs (package repo) in time. That happens without any additional effort. The poetry2nix converts poetry.lock file to nix packages that are once again locked in time, and that also happens behind the scenes.

    The result is that all dependencies (python dependencies - from poetry.lock as well as the rest of the system (python, c libraries etc) - from flake.lock are all locked and in my repo. So everything is repeatable without effort on my side.

    To repeat that with Dockerfile is much more challenging.

    I do think your approach is interesting though. Certainly less effort than manually packing an OCI with something like buildpaks or trying to run through bazel to get your way through a distroless build (two other methods that don’t make massive images with a Debian base). And obviously ‘From:scratch’ in docker build land is a nightmare.

    If you get your app build with Nix. The whole thing, including all of app’s dependencies are explicitly referenced so you can wrap it into a docker, an rpm file, OS image etc.

    It’s controversial, but IMO nix is actually easier than what we are doing now. I think the problem is that it is a massive paradigm shift and what most people know what to do with existing technologies will generally be not useful, so you have to relearn everything.

    But IMO it pays off. For example when starting a new project I can package the whole thing in 5 minutes. poetry2nix translates the project and it’s dependencies into nix packages and then since nix understands dependencies for my project it can package it automatically.


  • I started to use Nix to build containers that contain just my app and nothing else. The benefit of it is that it makes containers smaller, removes unused components (less potential attack vectors) and a container from a specific checked out version will always be identical (Dockerfile on its own (without extra work) doesn’t provide such guarantee). I also have the ability to customize python and dependencies to remove additional pieces that I don’t need (this unfortunately requires some experience with Nix, to know how to do it)

    I wrote my own abstraction on top of poetry2nix and nix2container to remove need for boilerplate: https://github.com/takeda/nix-cde

    The example shows how a hello world application can be packed and then how I can reduce its size further from 178MB to 68.9MB. This doesn’t include using musl to get the size even lower than that.

    Though I totally agree with author about venv and that’s what I did before and still do in situations where I can’t use Nix. Venv is standardized and is much more predictable and prevents surprises.


  • So first of all, your mom is reluctant in letting others know where she lives. It has nothing to do with rights but with decency and respecting her wishes.

    As when it comes to your rights, actually you have very little as an adult. Technically now your mom could say that you have to move out and if she did that you would be on your own even if that would mean being homeless.

    Since you are so eager to go on a date, asking about your rights wrt your mom I think you likely don’t understand why your mom is concerned and sound like an easy prey to someone that can just use you and you will deeply regret shortly after.

    Why not meet someone in normal circumstances (like school, work etc) instead dating strangers?

    Remember that having additional privileges is a small part of being adult, much bigger are responsibilities that you get and consequences of bad decisions that you make.

    Don’t start your adult life with something you might regret.

    It’s funny that kids wish they were adults while adults wish they were kids again.






  • Well it was essentially a boycott. If people will stop buying games made by them, then publishers will stop hiring them and the company will go bankrupt. So I can understand the motivation for it.

    Now, I think the whole scandal is really manufactured. The company goal is basically to provide contractor writers to help with game development. They try to differentiate themselves by claiming that they write content that is inclusive, which can help make games for a wider populace.

    The hate though is misdirected. People are claiming that the games are bad, because the company made them bad, when in reality if publisher prefers to hire contractor writers rather than hire their own, they likely don’t care about quality and just want to milk the franchise.

    I actually had no idea bout this scandal until yesterday, when it was talked by a streamer while playing Cyberpunk 2077. The guy complained how other games are ruined by SweetBaby. What is golden for me is that he said he loves Cyberpunk 2077, that it’s very fun game, but in the game you have straight, gay, bi, trans NPC characters. You can even be gay, bi, trans yourself.

    The game has loser men, and powerful women (I mean the NUSA president is a women) similarly, you have black characters that are very powerful and honorable, you have a powerful Asian woman in DLC that has skills that you can’t surpass. I mean the game is the wokest of woke, yet still “it is fun” for him.

    To me it was perfect example that it is all bullshit, and really what makes game great is the effort put in not whether it is woke/anti-woke.







  • Yeah, fuck Microsoft. They haven’t changed at all.

    For example I remember when they held monopoly in a browser market and purposely broke their sites for other browsers.

    Now the IE is gone, they have Chrome based Edge and are doing it again, if for example you try to use their office and make Teams call in Firefox it will refuse saying you should use Edge or Chrome. I’m guessing they are now trying again to claim they support another browser in case of antitrust, but Edge and Chrome is essentially the same thing. They just want to kill Firefox.


  • Yeah, the names imply that those should be TZ aware. Though I can understand the reasoning, as this change can silently break already broken code that kind of works, and would be a nightmare to fix in a large codebase.

    I also disagree with author, about naive datetime. I don’t think there is a good use case for them, and people who use them, do so because they are not aware of the issues.

    The only argument I saw was for micro performance improvements, which is kind of funny to care about when programming in python. Since it is implemented in C, the code removing the timezone likely takes more resources.