[CJefferson]

I've started looking at this. Part of the problem is that nix wants (reasonably) to do "everything itself", including (for example) bundling the OS X SDKs itself.

At the moment that's broken (the 10.9 SDK is installed in 10.11, then links against some 10.11 libraries, which is blocking mplayer). I don't have the knowledge to fix it.

homebrew and fink have had the same problem (deciding when to link against system libraries and when to try to rebuild) -- hopefully nix will get over this hurdle.

[davexunit]

The correct answer for Nix is to never link against a library provided by the system. Nix provides its own bootstrap binaries and it must be done that way for the sake of reproducibility.

[CJefferson]

This is exactly what Nix does, but not all libraries are currently 'Nixified', and the ones which are aren't consistent.

Apple doesn't help this -- they want you to just install xcode and the most recent SDK and nothing else.

[matt4077]

well, there's xcode-select to chose the SDK you want which kinda implies the availability of multiple – currently for example swift 2.2 and 3.0.

I'm tempted by the "1-environment" idea but homebrew has done such an excellent job in comparison to fink/port, I';; stay loyal. Also wondering if those two projects couldn't profit from some code sharing?

[mseri]

Is it possible to avoid bundling old sdk and use the one installed instead by xcode instead? Or it would require too much troubles?

EDIT: completed sentence

[Ericson2314]

We used to be more impure on osX, but that was also hard to maintain so a bunch of work was done over the past year.

Better CI + critical mass of maintainers (and that's just a few more) is all we need now.