> Wait, really? You run "apt-get install X Y Z" in a Nix expression? It's probably possible, if you're running Nix on a Debian-based distro, assuming permissio

> Wait, really? You run "apt-get install X Y Z" in a Nix expression? It's probably possible, if you're running Nix on a Debian-based distro, assuming permissions and things are set up right. Of course, that probably counts as Nix abuse, the results wouldn't be any nicer than using apt-get as-is, and it may play badly with Nix's caching. As a more realistic example, it's perfectly possible to fetch a bunch of repos and configure/build them using the normal processes for that language, e.g. something like this for a Haskell package: with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "some-haskell-app" { buildInputs = [ ghc cabal-install git ]; } '' echo "Fetching dependencies" 1>&2 git clone "http://some-url" cd cloned-repo cabal update echo "Building" 1>&2 cabal sandbox init cabal configure --prefix=$out cabal build echo "Installing" 1>&2 cabal install ''; If you like opaque, monolithic blobs of bash, then the above seems pretty comparable to Docker. The reason few Nix users would do such a thing isn't that it's not possible, it's just that Nix's language makes it easy to decouple those pieces into composable modules; verify, cache and share intermediate results; selectively override parameters; inspect and debug at a REPL; etc. In fact, it's probably quite straightforward to implement a docker-like system as a bunch of Nix functions, e.g. to get something like: with import <nixpkgs> {}; fauxDocker { baseImage = http://some/huge/docker/blob; # Will be run in a chroot of the above image setup = '' apt-get update apt-get install foo bar ... ''; };