nix-bonito
bonito is a declarative Nix channels manager. It is written to replace some of
Flakes’ features.
Usage
To be implemented.
bonito is meant to be used with a VCS such as Git. As a result, changes to the
configuration file and its checksum files should be committed so that they can
be rolled back using the VCS.
# Initialize with an existing config and lock file.
bonito # uses $HOSTNAME.toml, OR
bonito -c hackadoll3.toml
# Initialize and update the lock file. Run this if $HOSTNAME.toml is modified.
bonito -u
Why not Flakes?
In case you don’t know, Nix introduced an experimental feature named
Flakes, which effectively allows the user to
declaratively define all impure inputs in a flake.nix file, completely
replacing Nix channels. These impure inputs are then locked in a flake.lock
file.
The idea of locking input dependencies under a file isn’t new: we know that Go
does it with go.mod, Rust does it with Cargo.lock, NodeJS does it with
package-lock.json, etc.
The reason why I wrote bonito instead of using Flakes is because Flakes tries too hard to be a smart tool, which ends up making it very frustrating to use. A list of quirks that I don’t like about Flakes include:
- Flakes detects if you’re in a Git repository and impose weird restrictions based on that. This makes using it a bit more frustrating.
- Flakes are still mostly experimental. At the time this was written, the CLI tools have lots of quirks, many of which makes it barely usable.
- Flakes caused an infinite recursion error on my config for very mysterious
reasons. Writing
bonitotook me less time than debugging that error.
