bazel_rules_qt VS nixpkgs

I migrated a mid-size polyglot project from Makefiles to Bazel and C++ was a large component of the project.

Some obstacles:

1. Building with QT5 MOC & UI files. There is a great library[0] for it but it has hardcoded paths to the QT binaries and header files assuming a system-wide installation. I had to patch the rule to point to our QT location. Then it worked fine.

2. There is no rule to build a fully static library[1]. Since we were shipping a static library in our Makefile system, that was somewhat annoying.

3. We were using system links like `$PROJECT_ROOT/links/GCC/vX.Y.Z/ -> /opt/gcc/...` to point to all the build tools, but these didn't work in Bazel I think because it required absolute paths for any binaries it calls. We ended up putting them in a .bazelrc but we would need a different one for Windows and Linux.

4. Not good integration with IDEs

Ultimately we did not keep using Bazel because we were building Python binaries and py_binary was too slow on Windows. And we didn't have enough time to write a PyInstaller rule.

[0]: https://github.com/justbuchanan/bazel_rules_qt

[1]: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/1920

I haven't really used bspwm and sxhkd, but from nixpkgs it seems all the inputs from *.configFile just get used in a command such as $ sxhkd/bspw -c . So I'm guessing, if it's possible to run a complete config through a single command, you should write it up like such and not like the actual config file. It probably just works with bspwm because its a single command.

I'm beginning to think that i don't fully understand this line of the nixpkgs :

I briefly considered it, but there are some big problems:

- The new replacement package, syncserver-rs, has already been added to Nixpkgs with a NixOS module [0]

- Python 2 and the package itself are no longer supported, meaning...

- support in Nixpkgs is pretty rough - dependencies have been updated such that they no longer support Python 2, or have been removed outright, meaning...

- syncserver has already been removed from Nixpkgs

- in order to avoid the problem of unsupported dependencies, I delegated it to a community project, poetry2nix[1]. Even so,it was a nightmare to get working, lots of hacks and workarounds were needed

Of course, my repo is public, so anyone is welcome to use the Flake within. If they do, I'd suggest dropping me a line so I don't do anything drastic to the package or module.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/176835

I'm also working on power.ups improvements in this PR https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/213006 so please let me know your painpoints and wishlist items.

Took newAM's standalone config from here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/91681 and heavily modified it to make it work over a lan.

I already filed an issue: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/201507

PiHole-wise there are a bunch of 3rd party solutions on the pull request. I don't know enough about pihole to discuss them though.

I'd say it's really about the documentation, including "unofficial" documentation like bug reports and SO questions. Part of why Ubuntu is so popular is because there's enough of a community that whatever issue you hit, someone's probably already hit it before and asked about it on SO, where it has a highly upvoted answer that fixes the issue and explains it. That's also why NixOS seemed like a better choice than Guix to me.

One thing I ran into was setting up a Python project using poetry2nix. Mostly works great, but then you sometimes get inscrutable error messages. I had to copy this into a shell.nix file for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me (and I had to hunt it down from https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs myself instead of finding docs or a bug report):

    astunparse = super.astunparse.overridePythonAttrs