I guess this is a tangent, but Nix to me feels like the right idea with the wrong abstraction. I can't explain / it would take a serious bit of genius to come up with an alternative worth switching to.
Has anyone done any better?
Has anyone done any better?
It's not solving the underlying problem: that build systems are often impure and sometimes nondeterministic. It also tries to solve a bunch of adjacent problems, like providing a common interface for building many different types of package, providing a common configuration language for builds as well as system services and user applications in the case of NixOS and home-manager, and providing end-user CLI tools to manage the packages built with it. It's trying to be a build wrapper, a package manager, a package repository, a configuration language, and more.
It's not Nix's job, imo. Those compilers should be fixed.
And all the other "features" come for free from Nix's fundamental abstractions, I don't feel it would overstep its boundaries anywhere.
Imagine constant time compute and constant memory constrains, required in cryptography, being applied to the nix ecosystem.
Yes, this is an artifical example but it shows that purity is harder to define and come by, then some people think. Maybe someday these constraints actually do apply to nix goal of reproducibility.
With ever changing hardware that purity is a moving target so nix imo will always be an approach to purity and bundling so much tooling is to be expected. Still, you can legitimately call it a hack :)
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/doc/manual/source/s...
I am working on the docs for this as we speak.
In Gentoo
`emerge -e <package name>` will do it, add binpkgs if you know what you're doing (I do, and I do).