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by speed_spread
1533 days ago
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Shared projects should not depend on a particular package manager. You may use Nix, but the next person might use something else because reasons. If you bind a project's lifecycle to a specific OS you'll be trading your convenience for those of others. |
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It is also not a package manager like "apt", "dnf" or "pacman" as it does not fill the same niche. It does not even have to fill the same niche on every project.
As an example: at my job we're using it exclusively for optionally managing shared developer dependencies. Everyone is free to manage their own dependencies if they don't want or can't use Nix. But a flake.nix is there so you can get everything configured for you automatically.
In a personal shared project of mine I use it for tracking developer and build dependencies, meaning that I can build the project through Nix without having any of the dependencies specific to this project installed globally on my machine, meaning I can work on other projects that use incompatible versions of the same library, and keep the project reproducible.
On my desktop and laptop I use it as part of NixOS (which is an OS), to configure both from a single, mostly-shared configuration I keep in Git, replacing a mountain of terrible Ansible and shell scripts that did not work even nearly as well.
You can also use it to generate Docker images, operating system ISO images, distribute your app as an AppImage, Snaps,... and many other things. And you get an actual programming language to do all that with all the tooling the community maintains for each usecase.
If you're just using it as an asdf replacement, as the comment you originally replied to compared it to, your project will not be any more locked in to Nix than it would be to asdf.