nix-doc VS rules_nixpkgs

I love nix, I've been using it for the last 2 years, I have a very stable setup from these 2 years of effort [0], and I just can't recommend Nix for Linux beginners, why?

It's not because of the nix language, It's not because of the CLI, it's because everything is scattered, you have to consult many places to find out how to do things with Nix, here is an example:

Usually, when I need a new complex program, like Steam, I first check the system-wide configuration [1], the wiki [2] and the package list [3], if I just want it on my user, I need to check if Home Manager has an option [4], if it doesn't, I can try using the "home.packages" option. Now, if I need to override something on the package, I need to remember how to do it with [5] [6] (while checking the source code for the package in parallel to find the options).

And then sometimes, on very rare occasions, I need to fine tune something with the nix language, so I need to check the builtins/lib docs [7], but some builtins are not there, so I need to either use nix-doc [8] or find the docs inside the code-bases [9] [10] (they are split between both repos)

For me, this is one of the main pain points of using Nix / NixOS that needs to be solved.

[0] - https://github.com/shiryel/nixos-dotfiles

[1] - https://search.nixos.org/options

[2] - https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Steam

[3] - https://search.nixos.org/packages

[4] - https://mipmip.github.io/home-manager-option-search/

[5] - https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-customising-packa...

[6] - https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packag...

[7] - https://teu5us.github.io/nix-lib.html

[8] - https://github.com/lf-/nix-doc

[9] - https://github.com/NixOS/nix

[10] - https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

I have spent a little bit of time working on a prototype of a setup like this, and have needed to write a lot of (hacky) glue and BUILD files.

I take it you have departed quite a bit from https://github.com/tweag/rules_nixpkgs ? Are you generating BUILD.bazel files for nixpkgs, or are you doing that by hand?

I'm a fan of Tweag's rules_nixpkgs for bazel: https://github.com/tweag/rules_nixpkgs

Check out rules_nixpkgs as another way to get hermetic python. It does require that you install Nix, but everything else is driven from the Bazel side. Works for us on Linux and macos.

Cool, thanks for the link.

For what it's worth, we use rules_nixpkgs to source Postgres (for Linux and Darwin) as well as things such as C and Python toolchains, and it's been working really well. It does require that the machine have Nix installed, though, but that opens up access to Nix's wide array of prebuilt packages.

https://github.com/tweag/rules_nixpkgs