@rperezrosario So here's my latest gripe with debian. I've been using debian (or its derivatives) on servers at most of the companies I've worked at, but only because most of my team members wouldn't be familiar with something that's different from "regular" linux distros.

debian packaging tools are funny. I encountered a package (not foss/in debian repos) with a postinst script that under certain (trivial) conditions would keep running forever. here's what happened when I tried installing it:

• ctrl+c didn't work
• kill on the running apt/dpkg processes stopped it, but…
• it's impossible to remove the half-installed package; apt purge told me: Error: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
• spoiler alert: dpkg --configure -a attempts to finish installing packages. that includes trying to run the postinst again, which wouldn't finish.

I could work around that. But I've been using linux for 25 years now, and have been working in sysadmin/devops-like roles for almost 18 years now.

I can't imagine a regular user even knowing where to start fixing something like this.

#debian

@purrperl @krutonium @abmurrow @rperezrosario

Perl lost function signatures along the way, since they were considered impractical.

I still see them documented in perldoc, and no mention of deprecation.
https://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub#Signatures

@krutonium @purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario ruby can convincingly pretend to be a functional language.

Though I wouldn't want to start a new project in a language that features DHH on the front page.

Perl is something that would put me off from using Nix. I'm happy that some critical NixOS components are getting rewritten from perl into rust/python. I've been using Linux/unix-like systems for 25 years now, and perl did not seem to improve that much in all this time. It gained… function signatures. And for a while it had a "switch/case"-like syntax construct, but that has been deprecated again, apparently.

@purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario I think you're underestimating the scope of "replace nix".

@purrperl @abmurrow @rperezrosario I've been using it since late 2019/early 2020, and - tbh - I didn't notice too many dramatic changes.

The nix language is still a somewhat weird functional programming language. The learning curve is a bit rough if you're not used to functional programming languages. REPL in the "official" implementation needs some love; one of the forks - Lix - mostly fixes REPL in my experience, and can be used on regular NixOS installations.

In my first few weeks/months of using NixOS i was treating configuration.nix as just a silly json, with a slightly different syntax. I think that's a good approach to limit the number of things to learn at the same time.

Flatpak and docker work on nixos, for the things that aren't packaged. AppImage sometimes need some work.

The number of packages in nixpkgs did grow.

@abmurrow @rperezrosario I deal with debian packaging tooling at work, and the more I do so, the less I want to deal with debian in my own free time.

Nix and nix(pkgs) documentation are absolutely great compared to the mess around dpkg/apt/debhelper/lintian/different debhelper modules.