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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

nix does all three of these, I think.

It is nowhere near as cross-platform as pkgsrc - it only really supports macOS and Linux.

I love Nix, but this is true. The cross-platform support for pkgsrc is outstanding, and Nix's is still relatively limited.

Nix has better cross-compilation support is a little bit better than its native support, in terms of cross-platform coverage. But even then, I think, pkgsrc's platform coverage is in a different league. :)

It looks interesting. However, documentation is sparse. It doesn't clearly say what platforms are supported other than macOS and NixOS (which implies Linux in general, but doesn't clearly state it). Also, it seems to only target x86 and amd64. No mention is made of any other architecture, nor of any BSD other that macOS.

Do you have more information?

From <https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#ch-supported-platforms>:

> Nix is currently supported on the following platforms:

> - Linux (i686, x86_64, aarch64).

> - macOS (x86_64).

How does one bootstrap nixpkgs from source? Trying to install nix gives:

sh install-nix-2.3.10 install-nix-2.3.10: sorry, there is no binary distribution of Nix for your platform

There's partial support for platforms besides macOS and Linux, but I'm not sure the state of it or how practical it is.

What platform are you hoping to build Nix on?

I guess 3 is sort of anti-nix, but I think nix effectively has this with the way nix-build/nix-shell work.

Unprivileged works now?

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