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plac-for-apple-platform

Unofficial Roon client for Apple devices

Manage tools using Devbox rather than mise-en-place/asdf Vala, a programming language often(?) used in GTK world, is missing from mise/asdf registries. I've been feeling itches while using mise/asdf due to lack of packages. For example, REUSE tool, which I use for most of my recent projects, does not exist in their registries. I choose Devbox among the three options: * devenv * Nix Flake (without helper tools) * Devbox ## devenv This is the first tool I tried. Their website looks good, features sounds good, and sample Nix file looks okay. Their getting started guide starts with "devenv init", which creates not only their config file but touches other toolings' files (`.gitignore` and `.envrc`). "init" command without manual setup step, especially touching others' files is big sign of shitty tooling design, but I continued hoping other parts would be "okay". Unfortunately they weren't. CLI "search" command emits hundres of warnings, and outputs table does not check terminal width so it badly wraps and border characters gets in a way that the output is nearly unreadable. When I ran its shell command, it paused the execution with a warning message about binary cache. So devenv by default uses creator's own paid SaaS? I don't think just using devenv requires paid subscription, but unclear writing and CLI tries to push Cachix service into users' Nix config is no-no for me. The tool seems to be a thin wrapper around Nix: it inherits some of upstream's bad designs (e.g. absolutely worst error trace, "nix develop" invokes "bash" regardless of the current shell). Their website advertise "Version support." but very few selected packages have that. Everything else relies on Nix's "use latest or die" versioning schema. Considering devenv's "Language support" is just import helpers for nixpkgs, this "Version support." feels like a false advertising. Half-baked YAML/Nix architecture prevents users from using overlays or other flakes with "follows" input to reduce duplications. And using Flake requires running Flake command ("nix develop --no-pure-eval") instead of their CLI, which completely dismissed the value of their tool for me. Also reading their docs are uncomfortable given the tool is not good quality one: > Many experienced Nix users prefer to use Nix flakes, although devenv > is considered a superior interface since it's way simpler, but lacks > integration with existing tooling. Superior, huh? There are still features not present in bare Nix/Flake, but I find those scripts/tasks/tests not useful. If every developer has access to same toolchains, why not simply write script? (JS or Python or Go or whatever) Overall, I see no benefits over bare Nix/Flake or mise/asdf. ## Nix Flake Nix the language is ugly and readability is mediocre (I maintain my machines using Home Manager and still hard time *parsing* program.) It's not good at handling toolchain versions and I don't believe people not using Nix regularly can understand/write even *okay* quality code. Combined with its worst of the worst debuggability, I mean error trace, this is not something I'd like to maintain alongside application development. But most importantly, they still runs "bash" on "nix develop" even a user uses zsh or fish. Hard pass. ## Devbox Actually this was not in my radar initially, but found during figuring best way to write Flake for monorepo. It's not a kind of software I like: docs are next to a cloud offering, docs site hosted on Vercel, corporate site calling nonsense-text- generators-having-high-chance-of-makes-sense-response "AI" without defining intelligence or artifical one, allowing JSONC for ".json" file extension (fuck you M$ for starting this fucking tradition) and not supporting ".jsonc" file extension. But the tool itself is good actually. * Config file is JSON rather than YAML. * Config schema is concise and straightforward. * CLI works great. No wrapping tables. * CLI is fast. * Structure of their docs website is *great*. I should steal from that. * Supports versions, really. It's hard to describe... UX for Devbox is similar to or better than mise-en-place. Simplicity? No bullshit API design? I don't know. I find this tool to be simpler to use and easier to understand compared to other tools, even including non-Nix ones such as asdf, nvm, and mise. I may encounter problems rooted to Devbox in a future. I may get frustrated due to mistyping "debvoc" or something. But for now, I believe Devbox is the best suited for this project (and my other projects too.)

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Shota FUJI
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Shota FUJI
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