Well I certainly wouldn't call anything a panacea, but I'm not sure I'd fully agree with either of those criticisms. Having other people in the project use caba

Well I certainly wouldn't call anything a panacea, but I'm not sure I'd fully agree with either of those criticisms. Having other people in the project use cabal install -- well, you can't blame a tool for other people not using it. It's true that nixpkgs doesn't track multiple versions of packages, but using the existing tooling (cabal2nix) it should be possible to fix down the versions you need. Towards the second point, nix isn't meant to figure out what C libraries you need; it's meant to let you specify exactly what those are and be confident that those will be respected.