[viraptor]

I think you're missing the point of nix. Unlike other systems, yes you can make it mix's business to provide that. And the threshold for "OS installed" becomes blurry enough that projects can include the definition of what they depend on from the system.

[speed_spread]

You're missing my point, that building a public project from source should not require you to have a specific package manager installed.

[viraptor]

I don't believe there's any non-nixos project so integrated with nix that it's required. You'd need to show some example here. It's normally just a wrapper for the description of how to setup the system - which you can totally do on your own and that's how most projects roll: just a text description of dependencies / versions.

[rgoulter]

"project should be able to be built without nix" is reasonable.

"Nix shouldn't provide compiler toolchain" is not.

Nix's whole design is oriented around explicit description of inputs in programmatic descriptions of package.