Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applications for Rust
13 points by jacekg
13 points by jacekg
I’ve been less enamored with Nix over the past couple of months as I do more coding using LLM tooling that self-directs, like claude-code. I’ve had a couple issues with the environment not being picked up correctly and I find that it has relatively low awareness of these solutions so I’ve been leaning more on shell scripts and Makefiles.
But one area I really appreciate it is project-level configuration - I much prefer devenv or raw flakes to having to manage all my dependencies (and my colleagues) with non-declarative syntax or develop inside docker files.
Straightforward packaging stories like this are probably enough to keep me using devenv in new projects for the next year, which is something I’ve been a bit on the fence about. The simplified user interface from devenv continues to be worth the extra jump in abstraction.
I think that development in the NixOS community nowadays happens in repositories outside of the NixOS foundations and communities banner (like devenv) and once they reach maturity, similiar patterns are taken up by upstream.
Not sure wether I like pulling in a dep for everything but that’s the way the cookie crumbles right now as far as I can see
It’s going to be very hard for the community to agree on these opinionated decisions, because there’s no consensus to be made here - someone has to pick something and go with it.
The whole governance is another topic, best discussed in it’s own place.
I think it’s great to give people an opinionated solution with an abstraction. Not everyone wants to dig into the details of the various options.
Hi Domen! Don’t misunderstand, that’s not a complaint (except for pulling in deps) but more of an observation.
I think it’s great seeing the opinionated choices being made and those decisions are the ones that actually bring us forward.
Governance wise I think we’ll see how it goes, patience goes a long way.
Hey! Oh, criticism is welcome, it helps us shape devenv :)
We don’t pull in the deps until you explicitly start using some of the features, so I find that a good balance!