On Thu, Sep 15, 2022 at 11:21 AM Alyssa Ross <
hi@alyssa.is> wrote:
José Pekkarinen <jose.pekkarinen@unikie.com> writes:
> The following patch proposes to host nix configuration
> files under nix folder that offers default configuration
> for an image, defaulting to a release image, which would
> be plain spectrum. A hardened default configuration will
> be proposed in the near future. In case of configuration
> collision between the default configuration and config.nix,
> the latter will be taken into account.
>
> Signed-off-by: José Pekkarinen <jose.pekkarinen@unikie.com>
> ---
> nix/eval-config.nix | 3 ++-
> 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
Hi José, thanks for the patch!
It looks like the correct way to implement such a feature, but I'm not
sure about the feature itself.
Currently we only have a single configuration option, pkgs. So it
doesn't make sense to be able to split build configuration across two or
more files, because only one of them would be able to set the one
configuration option that exists so far.
We could end up with more configuration options, of course, but I'd
really like to avoid the situation where a Spectrum build configuration
is so complicated it needs to be expressed across multiple files in this
way. Sometimes configuration is unavoidable, like how we have to give
people a way to use a vendor kernel if required, because we can't
possibly bundle every vendor kernel we might want to use into the same
image, but using build configuration should really be a last resort.
I'd expect very few Spectrum users overall to be building their own
images, so the most important thing is for the default configuration to
be as good as possible. Hardening falls under that — if we can do
something to harden the Spectrum system, we should probably be doing it
by default! Or if it's something that doesn't make sense to do by
default, can we make it configurable at runtime so that users don't have
to build their own images if they want to use it? (I'm hoping the
proposed developer mode could work this way, for example. I haven't
thought about it enough to know if it's practical, but Chrome OS can do
it.)
If we ever do end up with lots of configuration options to the point
where they're getting difficult to manage, we can re-evaluate something
like this (or at that point it might just be worth it to give in and
reuse the NixOS module system), but I don't think we're at that point
yet.
What do you think?
Hi,
In my humble opinion, considering that we are working at
an operative system level, the idea of having a default configuration,
and a debug configuration, preferably that we can activate at runtime,
was outnumbered, but not today, twenty years ago. Only thinking in
our current workflows, we can easily spot variables enough to show
that 2 configurations are not sufficient, you already gave a good
example with the vendor kernels, I can give some more, like building
for a vm, or a host, of arch x86_64 or arm, natively built, or cross
compiled, hardened or not, with debugging tools and symbols or
without them, with extra vms to run application X, without wayland
and graphics applications because our target machine doesn't have
a display. Several of these cases can be combined, and multiple
of them requires changes at build time not giving the option to
enable them at runtime, so eventually not only you'll have a big
set of configuration files, but you'll also want to combine them in
a smart way so that the complexity is bearable and your user
base doesn't get upset because it is very hard to handle.
Now, I have to fully disagree that we are not in the
point were we need to re-evaluate things, we are, and you were
before we joined you, you only need to take a look at the contribution
level of your project in time, since the effect of not implementing
flexibility to developers to make their own Spectrum OS for their
needs, is that you will end up with a big base of user that forks
Spectrum with a feature that is divergent enough that proposing
it back to the upstream is unlikely, or even more dangerous, that
the developer in question doesn't even know how to implement
the feature they are required, and they don't even try to hack
the system, loosing the contribution since the beginning. Needless
to mention, you can easily find examples of these 2 scenarios
inside Unikie, no need to look further. Examples in how this
flexibility can be implemented in multiple ways, and it is a
requirement to guarantee a bigger volume of contributions can
be found in communities like buildroot, yocto, or even Nix.
I hope these give you good hints, and if it doesn't, that
we friendly agree to disagree.