[microtonal]

I understand your comments including above and the one about CUDA binaries. Just one clarification on the concurrency in tests failure, do you mean it overloads the machine running multi process tests that then tests fail due to assumptions by the package authors?

I've found that quite some test suites have race conditions (e.g. simultaneous modification of files, etc.), which manifest themselves e.g. when a package uses pytest-xdist (and the machine has enough cores).

My main point is that Nix as a system is so incredibly powerful that perhaps there is an ability to “shadow” boring distributions,

I think things would improve vastly if it was possible to do CUDA builds in Hydra and have the resulting packages in the binary cache. My idea (when I was still contributing to nixpkgs) was to somehow mark CUDA derivations specially, so that they get built but not stored in the binary cache. That would allow packages with CUDA dependencies to get built as well (e.g. PyTorch). Nix would then only have to build CUDA locally (which is cheap, since it only entails unpacking the binary distribution and putting things in the right output paths) and would get everything else through the binary cache (like prebuilt PyTorch). But AFAIR it'd require some coordinated changes between Nix, Hydra, etc.

Then I started working for a company in the Python/Cython ecosystem and quickly found out that Nix is not really viable for most Python development. So I am now just using pyenv and pip, which works fine most of the time (we have some people in our team who are very good at maintaining proper package version bounds).

[alchemist1e9]

Have you ever come across anything debian -> nix expression tools?

Ubuntu seems to be winning mindshare across the board and while this would be different than nixpkgs itself I was thinking if it is possible to mass convert deb packages into nix expressions, this combined with overlays would allow rapid incremental testing of marginal modifications to a current distribution’s stacking of versions.

A bit like how Nix community has tools on top of the various language packaging systems but this would be a layer on top of the debian packaging standards.

Maybe it’s crazy but just an idea I’ve been having recently and wondering how hard it might be. Importantly debian deb and apt systems are very reproducible and structured which is a good fit for a Nix based layer.