[PaulDavisThe1st]

> with a consistently deployable build stack. So if you want to distribute a .app package, you could use nix to build it, and then people could download it and install/configure it according to some different scheme.

> But if it's trivial to reliably instantiate the build stack, why not just ship that instead and dispense with the special format? Then nobody has to wonder if you slipped some malware in the package before you distributed it.

This suggests to me that either you don't know how .app packaging works on macOS (or various ad-hoc packaging on Linux, such as Firefox or Ardour), or you're making a point that I'm missing.

The whole point of these non-Nix systems is precisely that you just package up bits of the build stack into the thing you distribute, and you reduce or eliminate system dependencies other than such basics as the system C library or X11.

[__MatrixMan__]

I had misunderstood what a .app package was, thanks for clarifying. So do people package things like linters and language servers into the .app also? Like, is it everything I'd need to work on the app, or is just everything I'd need to run the app?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Everything needed to run the application.