What I meant to ask is: how much time, approximately, did you spend working with Nix? 1 hour? 10 hours? 10 days? 10 months?
You know that it is not 10 months, but I do object to your line of questioning. I have invested a considerable good-faith effort into getting to the bottom of what you and Andres have been saying. I am no seasoned expert at Nix but I have been through the process of installing and using multiple distributions, and reading around and I have been paying attention to what you have been saying. But my time is really quite limited. I of course know exactly what I have been doing in putting together the JustHub distribution and while they have some similarities -- mostly around the idea of allowing multiple tool chains to co-exist; the way they go about it is very different. And those details are critical in my mind (please note). I also know that I have been adding things that a generic package manager is most unlikely to be covering -- because a new tool is provided that tangles with the existing tools in a detailed way (e.g., parsing spec files and analysing package databases for example). To take just one example, I provide a mechanism that allows developers to archive the configuration of their Haskell development environment and check it into a source management system. The developer can check it out on a another system and if the build process invokes the recovery mechansim it will automatically rebuild the environment on the first run (reporting an error if the required tool chain is not installed on the system). Subsequent runs of the build process will merely check that nothing has been disturbed and proceed straight to the main build process. Maybe Nix provides such a mechanism -- I don't know. But all attempts to discover this and other mechanisms have failed and any hard information that I come across suggests that this is unlikely. (Hint: it is mostly concerned with the Haskell *user* package DB; I have just expanded on the 'archiving' part of the original announcement by the way.) It is a great shame as I like the Nix philsophy and I would like to see the other distributions adopt more of its functional philosophy. But I am out of time. If you will excuse me I would rather wind up this thread once you have replied (if you would like to) Chris