Travis Everett Ana Hobden Solene Rapenne Theophane Hufschmitt Matthew Kenigsberg Graham Christensen Matthias Nösner
- It has been private for some time.
- DetSys will make it open.
- Note that we're still pushing to master as we experiment.
- Feel free to experiment, but if you're about to invest real time into something -- let's talk about it first.
Travis: At what point might we suggest people use it / will it be harder to make changes to the upstream installer?
Graham:
Unclear, we're hesitant to be concrete about that since it is really important that the community wants to adopt the installer in the first place.
We also haven't started concretely implementing the Nix installer for macOS yet, since we were waiting for the macOS infrastructure to support it. We ordered it about a month ago, it arrived on Monday, and we plugged them in yesterday. Hopefully we can get the implementation started and finished in a few weeks -- but it is early to tell.
Graham: At DetSys, we're trying really hard to avoid "deciding for" the greater community that the installer we're working on is to be the official one. We want the greater community to want and choose it, or not -- which would be okay too: it is an experiment.
Ana: should the installer mirror the existing upstream one?
Eelco: ideally, but if it is making opinionated choices, we should check with the greater community to see what they think.
Solene: if people want those other features, they can make those changes with PRs.
Theophane: I don't know single user mode, but it sounds like a red herring since it is so simple to install. Could fall back to a bash script.
Graham: If people want single-user Nix, we can encourage the static built Nix.
- MVP line where we show it off to the community.
- Let's not hash it out too far.
- Linux
- should we support non-systemd machines?
- what about Alpine?
- better supported by some sort of "container" installation of Nix
- x86_64
- aarch64
- MacOS
- x86_64
- aarch64
- Multi-user at a minimum
- Single-user very probably
- Uninstaller
- Idempotency
- Shells:
- Bash
- ZSH
- Fish
- Be intentional about what we break from the old installer and potential migration paths
Nice to have:
- FreeBSD, perhaps, in the future.
- rolling back on failure (We have)
- Upgrade Nix via the installer?
- repair
- self-test shell profile
- Customizability to some degree, perhaps with flags
- Is armv6/armv7 still relevant? See NixOS/nix#7056
- How does direnv support multiple shells?
- How will we continue supporting all the existing users who are automating the installation of Nix?
- Dynamic users
- systemd / launchd units
- Perhaps systemd Portable Services?
- Github action
- Minimize environment variables that need to be set
Maybe we should drop armv6 or armv7 support from the current installer? Hydra doesn't build packages for these architectures.