edk0

IRC friends, enemies and others,

Control of freenode has recently been seized by the proprietors of Freenode Limited, a holding company established by a previous head of freenode and a third party as part of a deal with a corporate sponsor. The terms of that deal were not disclosed, and remain unknown to me.

At the time, we, freenode's volunteer staff, were given informal guarantees that staff retained operational control of the network. The same guarantees were repeated after leadership was passed on to a new head of staff. I don't

tobi-wan-kenobi

Void Linux installation (NVMe, btrfs, LVM, full disk encryption using LUKS, 2FA-ish, SSD TRIM)

Here's a record of my experiences when setting up Void Linux for the first time, maybe it contains useful information for somebody :-)

Basics

• Laptop: Lenovo IdeaPad S340
• Void Linux installer version: 20191109 (x86_64 musl)

Features

lheckemann

Expression for a buildEnv-based declarative user environment

This is one way of managing your user profile declaratively.

Alternatives include:

• an attrset-based nix-env-based environment, installed using nix-env -ir rather than nix-env --set. LnL has an overlay which shows a way of doing this.
• home-manager, which provides NixOS-like config for your $HOME

Note that this is incompatible with regular imperative use of nix-env, e.g. nix-env -iA nixpkgs.hello. It has the advantage of allowing the installation of multiple outputs of the same package much better than nix-env's builtin profile builder does.

infinisil

with import ./lisp.nix { a = null; }; eval
(defun fib (n)
  (defun fib2 (a b n)
    (iff (lt n 2) b
      (def (next (plus a b))
      (fib2 b next (minus n 1))))
  (fib2 0 1 n))
(fib 60))

mbbx6spp

Cached and Persistent Nix shell with direnv integration

Problem being solved

• the default direnv Nix integration from projects loads a Nix shell every new terminal or every time shell.nix and/or default.nix changes. On larger projects with a lot of Nix shell dependencies, that can cause the terminal to take more than 6 seconds to load, which significantly degrades the developer experience (DX).
• when a developer garbage collects in their Nix store, often the Nix shell dependencies are deleted also which causes a slow start the next time the project’s Nix shell is requested, also degrading developer experience (DX).

Solution outline

• on first Nix shell load, the Nix shell is evaluated fully such that direnv dumps the environment from the spawn Nix shell process

fasiha

Well, that was unexpected. In the following, I’m trying to follow Jon Evans’ advice from “The Terrible Technical Interview”.

---

To: recruitment@EmployerABC.com
From: Ahmed Fasih
Subject: Re: Programming Test Invitation

Hi there! Thanks for offering to let me take a HackerRank test for ABC, I appreciate the vote of confidence.

widdowquinn

Turning emacs into a Python IDE

## Create a new config/initialisation file

Create a user-level initialisation file init.el:

touch .emacs.d/init.el

mbinna

Effective Modern CMake

Getting Started

For a brief user-level introduction to CMake, watch C++ Weekly, Episode 78, Intro to CMake by Jason Turner. LLVM’s CMake Primer provides a good high-level introduction to the CMake syntax. Go read it now.

After that, watch Mathieu Ropert’s CppCon 2017 talk Using Modern CMake Patterns to Enforce a Good Modular Design (slides). It provides a thorough explanation of what modern CMake is and why it is so much better than “old school” CMake. The modular design ideas in this talk are based on the book [Large-Scale C++ Software Design](https://www.amazon.de/Large-Scale-Soft

LnL7

self: super:

{
  # Install overlay:
  # $ mkdir -p ~/.config/nixpkgs/overlays
  # $ curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/LnL7/570349866bb69467d0caf5cb175faa74/raw/3f3d53fe8e8713ee321ee894ecf76edbcb0b3711/lnl-overlay.nix -o ~/.config/nixpkgs/overlays/lnl.nix
  userPackages = super.userPackages or {} // {

    # Example:
    hello = self.hello;

zimbatm

Nixpkgs pinning example

This is an example of how to pin the version of nixpkgs in a package repo. The goal is to improve reproducibility, make sure all the developers use the same version of nixpkgs and also allow to share binary caches.

Usage

Put all these files in a nixpkgs folder and then in other derivations, instead of import <nixpkgs> {} use import ./path/to/nixpkgs {}

Keeping nixpkgs up to date