[sly010]

Sure it would be nice to have types for refactoring, but a more useful set of features would be:

- baked in fetchurl, fetchgit for easier bootstrapping

- a functional dsl for rendering filesystem hierarchies - instead of the find/sed/awk galore. 50% of the time when my nix recipe breaks it's not a nix syntax issue but something with bash. (reading nix is an exercise in learning new unix features)

- drop the channel feature entirely and make releases immutable tar files with hashes. I use nix as a build system on macos and right now a nix-channel update is a sure way to break all my builds which is the opposite of nix's promise

EDIT: formatting

[regnat]

For your last point, you don't have to use the channels (which will anyway be deprecated at some point iirc), and you can pin the nixpkgs version in your nix files (like it is done in https://garbas.si/2015/reproducible-development-environments...)

[bennofs]

for your first point., what about `builtins.fetchTarball` and `builtins.fetchurl` (`fetchgit` is in nix unstable afaik)