I feel that any system that can benefit from a high level of control (e.g. any production system) can also benefit from a source based distribution model. Of co

I feel that any system that can benefit from a high level of control (e.g. any production system) can also benefit from a source based distribution model. Of course the sysadmins using it need to know how to take advantage of that control (and e.g. maybe write some C). And of course, you can get the same thing with any modern package manager but then you have to be intimately familiar with the way packaging is built from source on that distro and how to build and run your own package hosts. Nix is quite unique (and elegant IMO), in that it: 1) forces you to learn at least a bit of a DSL to use and understand it and 2) seems to put you somewhere in between these two "extremes" of control. I don't know how easy it is to run a hydra build server (it didn't look very easy last time I checked), but I do know the nix DSL gave me a clean place to specify almost exactly how my system had differed from a base install.