mach-nix

nd I expected all that to be a rathole too. I wasn’t looking to push some tooling on the third-party maintainer or develop something I’d just throw away, I wanted to add a relatively simple feature. As it was I wound up spending the free time I had troubleshooting package management and ran out of time to actually get work done. I did file an issue with mach-nix, but the person who helped me also ran into problems. https://github.com/DavHau/mach-nix/issues/560 This kind of “brokenness in depth” is exactly what I ran into when I tried to troubleshoot and fix nixpkg’s iOS support over a few months. I have actually contributed a couple packages back, and I wrote a brew-like derivation adapter that may or may not still work on one of my macOS devices that worked with standard macOS installers/install archives (copy to Applications folder), but that got broken by an upstream update and fixing it became involved. Iirc whatever I did do to fix it made it unsuitable to upstream, and when I did get another macOS device, I didn’t even try to use nix for applications that weren’t immediately supported. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/feedback-darwin-installapplica... https://discourse.nixos.org/t/second-overlay-not-seeing-chan... Most recently I tried to create an Ubuntu container with USB forwarding under NixOS. Once again: bespoke solution, scant documentation, and GPT-4o got confused. I failed, and spent less time copying my files off and installing Ubuntu than I did trying to get it to work under NixOS. https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ga6dbe/comment/ltce... So this isn’t just one-off packages being broken that a maintainer needs to fix. It’s a deeply pervasive thing with the entire nix ecosystem that requires the community to internalize a need to make things work obviously and on the first try for common use cases. I don’t know anybody whose problem is “people want to pay me to work on nix with no other output product to the work other than more nix”, so I can’t recommend nix to anybody as a solution. You can’t solve a problem with more problems. And after the container incident, I’m truly lost as to what people ARE doing with nix besides just developing nix, because I thought it was supposed to be most popular in Devops contexts. And yet the very last thing I would entrust to nix at this point would be a production service whose infrastructure needs to be completely understood and rapidly fixable, because the abysmal documentation means a minor outage could turn into a major catastrophe while people google for some obscure forum post or decipher nixpkgs layer by layer. /rant

on applications and vendorize the deps (e.g., for work), you might try one of the tools above, which weren't available 3+ years ago. dream2nix is by the author of mach-nix IIRC and has the goal of establishing a unified standard and codebase for ${proglang}2nix type package generators. But mach-nix is still maintained and might be the more feature-complete choice between them. Maybe Nix-y Python users and developers can reply with some of their experiences using those tools for real projects :)