cabal2nix

Note: these points concern Nix, the situation may be different on Guix > * Do packages need to be 'ported' to Nix or its build / install system? If so, how much effort will it take and on what factors the effort required to port may vary substantially? (eg: Programming Language). Yes. To make Nix really work it has to be pervasive and this sometimes means porting packages again, however there's a lot of automation around this, see[0] for ones that leverage existing build systems in other languages. Autoconf and cmake packages are already accounted for by the default builder, and usually only the dependencies have to be specified. > * How is disk space usage? Is there any kind of deduplication? The Nix store can be intensive on memory, as once a dependency such as glibc is updated, all the reverse dependencies (i.e. the set X such that X

This is a good analysis. A potential option for his proposed build output format is http://nixos.org/nix/ expressions. Nix is already kind of a fusion of a package manager and a build system. It's rather mature, has a decent ecosystem and does a lot of what he is looking for: - Complete determinism, handling of multiple versions, total dependency graphs - Parallel builds (using that dependency graph) - Distribution One major benefit of a solution like generating Nix files over compiler integration is that it works for cross-language dependencies. A lot of the time integrated solutions break down is for things like if a C extension of a Ruby gem relies on the presence of imagemagick. Nix has no problem handling that kind of dependency. Also of course it is a lot less work to generate Nix expressions than it is to write a package manager. T