The Determinate installer has "Determinate" now as the default in their installer!

[oderwat]

We just had to search for the problem why a fresh nix-darwin did not work for one of our team members. It came down to that the nix installer from determinate now has "Determinate" as the default when installing Nix without the --determinate flag. I think you need to update your instructions.

[DavSanchez]

Hello, if I understand this right, the Determinate option is now the default on the Determinate Nix installer, there's no way to disable that default from what I have read in the installer repo, and there's no way to manage nix options from nix-darwin when using the determinate Nix installer?

[oderwat]

Not exactly. They ask you if you want to use the Determinate option and the default is "yes". It was "no" before. The instructions for nix-darwin says, to use the defaults (and our internal manual too). I think we need to tell the user that they need to watch out for that option and not to choose the default. I did not test if there would be a "--no-determinate" like option for the command.

By default, it will install vanilla upstream Nix with flakes enabled.

This is not true anymore. One needs to manually choose not to install Determinate while the script runs and asks for the options.

[DavSanchez]

I see, thanks!

[isker]

I did not test if there would be a "--no-determinate" like option for the command.

There is not 😬.

[imcquee]

Already ran into this myself. Thanks for opening up this issue, README change would probably help a lot of others

[adamcstephens]

This seems like a report that should be made to nix-installer. I don't think nix-darwin can do much about the changes.

[oderwat]

This seems like a report that should be made to nix-installer. I don't think nix-darwin can do much about the changes.

I posted this here, so that the installation instructions can get updated. Nobody (at least not me) expect that nix-darwin fixes something that is a pre-requisite for the installation of it.

[Enzime]

https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer?tab=readme-ov-file#determinate-nix-installer

Maybe their README is out of date as it still says the default is without --determinate

[Samasaur1]

The source code of both v0.37.2 and on main both show that it defaults to not installing Determinate, but I did find where it does prompt:

https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/blob/bedb14209c34988581785f432b49aa9ea1f5821a/src/cli/subcommand/install/determinate.rs#L31

So it looks like the prompt will be skipped if std::io::stdin().is_terminal() is false and/or the no_confirm flag is true. The prompt_for_determinate function is called here. no_confirm is controlled here.

So it seems like you shouldn't get Determinate so long as you're running a non-interactive install, but if you do the interactive install the installer will try to upsell you into installing Determinate

[oderwat]

Maybe their README is out of date

I posted this here because the nix-darwin readme says this:

To me, the Determinate site and the setup instructions here are two different things..