Thanks for taking the time to respond. It's good to know that there are reasons/workarounds for the various problems, but I hope you understood my main thrust, which is not that this is an exhaustive list of issues with Nix, but rather these are the kinds of issues one can expect to encounter (or perhaps I'm just unusually unlucky) when delving into Nix.
I get the perception that people think Nix is a panacea for common CI/CD problems (and to be clear, I think it could be such a panacea one day) but rather it solves some problems but introduces many more, harder problems--which no doubt individually have workarounds and so on, but finding them probably requires intimate knowledge of Nix and the ecosystem that you're trying to package. Unfortunately, I can live with suboptimal builds and a little nondeterminism/impurity, but I can't be dead-in-the-water because I can't figure out how to package a dependency that my app depends on.
So I'm rooting hard for Nix, but I want to share my experiences so potential users know what they might run into and so any Nix contributors know a bit more what users are running into (if it's not already known).
> I think most of us are interested in fixing problems.
I didn't mean to imply you weren't interested in fixing any problems, but rather the problems that I care about, which have persisted since I tried Nix for the first time circa 2014.
> So, it is quite hard to make fundamental changes to Nix (e.g. typing) and roll them out.
Surely gradual typing would be relatively easy to roll out, as the name implies? Similarly, documentation improvements could be rolled out pretty easily (e.g., put beginners on the happy path, don't recommend nix-env, tell people about homemanager if that's the thing they should be using, etc). I mean these things in the spirit of constructive feedback--if you want to court new users, these seem like low hanging fruit.
> Things are happening, e.g. flakes provide a standard interface to package sets, there is work on supporting content-adressed outputs (outside fixed-output derivations), but with the size of the Nix ecosystem, these things take a long time to crystallize and roll out.
I'm glad to hear things are moving--I'll need to read up on content-addressed output and flakes!
I get the perception that people think Nix is a panacea for common CI/CD problems (and to be clear, I think it could be such a panacea one day) but rather it solves some problems but introduces many more, harder problems--which no doubt individually have workarounds and so on, but finding them probably requires intimate knowledge of Nix and the ecosystem that you're trying to package. Unfortunately, I can live with suboptimal builds and a little nondeterminism/impurity, but I can't be dead-in-the-water because I can't figure out how to package a dependency that my app depends on.
So I'm rooting hard for Nix, but I want to share my experiences so potential users know what they might run into and so any Nix contributors know a bit more what users are running into (if it's not already known).
> I think most of us are interested in fixing problems.
I didn't mean to imply you weren't interested in fixing any problems, but rather the problems that I care about, which have persisted since I tried Nix for the first time circa 2014.
> So, it is quite hard to make fundamental changes to Nix (e.g. typing) and roll them out.
Surely gradual typing would be relatively easy to roll out, as the name implies? Similarly, documentation improvements could be rolled out pretty easily (e.g., put beginners on the happy path, don't recommend nix-env, tell people about homemanager if that's the thing they should be using, etc). I mean these things in the spirit of constructive feedback--if you want to court new users, these seem like low hanging fruit.
> Things are happening, e.g. flakes provide a standard interface to package sets, there is work on supporting content-adressed outputs (outside fixed-output derivations), but with the size of the Nix ecosystem, these things take a long time to crystallize and roll out.
I'm glad to hear things are moving--I'll need to read up on content-addressed output and flakes!