[WickedSmoke]

Recently someone has been trying to build a Nix package of an open source game I maintain, so I had a brief look at the project.

It does appear to be an experiment in package management that got out of hand. Basic usability is lacking, as I was unable to even get a listing of available packages on a NixOS virtual machine due to nix-env requiring well over 1GB of RAM. This flagrant waste of resources doesn't inspire confidence in the quality of the tools.

I'd rather see existing packaging data leveraged rather than adding a new language to the mix. Something like a translator or interpreter for RPM .spec files, for example.

[jbboehr]

Listing all packages is a bit of a weak spot. The entire package set is described in a lazy, functional language and listing or searching it requires evaluating the entire thing. A normal build will only require evaluating a small subset of the entire package list. `nix search` should have caching of results but it still requires evaluation to be populated.