I primarily think of Nix as being a build tool akin to Make rather than a package manager. It's almost as if the flakiness of Make made us think that building a

I primarily think of Nix as being a build tool akin to Make rather than a package manager. It's almost as if the flakiness of Make made us think that building applications or libraries was somehow a different thing to building an OS, so we invented a separate thing called a package manager. Then Nix came along and showed that a single build tool can be used for something as simple as a preprocessor (Nix's string quasiquotation is very nice), through to compiling applications, bundling applications into a coherent OS, and even orchestrating clusters of real & virtual machines. I wonder if this proposed system would be as amenable to handling such a wide variety of software (e.g. https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#chap-language-support https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#chap-language-support ) on such a wide variety of platforms (e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/os-specific https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/pkgs/os-specifi... ).