a few people in the replies are asking why someone might want to use nix as an OS / to manage your python packages / to manage your config files.
does anyone want to share their reasons for doing those things? I don't really know.
(please give examples of some specific problems Nix solves for you and what you like about it, don't just say "it's reproducible/declarative” :) )
@b0rk If I’m deploying machines to the cloud with Terraform and Ansible, I need the right versions of those tools for my project. Ansible can be installed via pip in a virtual environment, but Terraform is a binary. I might also need some CLI tools to play with the cloud API (s3_client, openstack_client, …) that might not all be Python tools.
So I’d use Nix to have something similar to a Python virtual environment, but for any tool that I need for a given project.
@b0rk The premise being that different projects might use different versions of the tools.
I learned about Nix from a freelance developer. For him, it’s precious, because every customer needs their versions of the tools.
Julia Evans
Ölbaum