Plurrrr

At Channable we use Nix to build and deploy our services and to manage our development environments. This was not always the case: in the past we used a combination of ecosystem-specific tools and custom scripts to glue them together. Consolidating everything with Nix has helped us standardize development and deployment workflows, eliminate “works on my machine”-problems, and avoid unnecessary rebuilds. In this post we want to share what problems we encountered before adopting Nix, how Nix solves those, and how we gradually introduced Nix into our workflows.

Around 1990, Richard Stallman (RMS) and I were writing the GNU C library getopt() and he wanted to extend it to support long (multi-character) option names for user-friendliness.

Here is an example to help you understand the importance of cherry-picking. Suppose you have made several commits in a branch, but you realize it's the wrong branch! What do you do now? Either you repeat all your changes in the correct branch and make a fresh commit, or you merge the branch into the correct branch. Wait, the former is too tedious, and you may not want to do the latter. So, is there a way? Yes, Git's got you covered. Here is where cherry-picking comes into play. As the term suggests, you can use it to hand-pick a commit from one branch and transfer it into another branch.