It seems like Nix can be installed on pretty much any system (including Windows?), but the reverse does not seem possible: why shouldn't one be able to install any system on NixOS?
In a perfect world, I envision having multiple systems running at the same time a la Qubes (http://qubes-os.org/trac), all nicely managed using nix, but a good start is finding a way to stuff Debian's package repository into NixPkgs. Currently, it seems like installing Debian packages on NixOS requires manually writing a derivation, and there are no tools to automate writing such a derivation. There's also the question of whether the Nix package format is flexible enough to allow installing/breaking up packages in something approximating "the Debian way," and whether the dependency solver in Nix is powerful enough to handle ~26,000 new packages, each with 3+ versions from the various debian-stable, debian-testing, and debian-unstable repositories. I looked over the Mancoosi project, and one of their tasks was formalizing maintainer scripts into a DSL. I think they've stopped (mostly), but EVOSS (the system they developed) is still up: http://mancoosi.di.univaq.it/?page_id=36 Presumably it wouldn't be too hard to take their translator and modify it to output in a format that Nix can read instead of whatever DSL they came up with, and then implement whatever glue code is needed to get Nix to understand those. After that it's a question of whether the infrastructure is up to it; even if Nix works perfectly (which it won't; it doesn't have any sort of SAT solver but just brute-forces things, correct?), Hydra will run out of disk space. I expect these problems can be mostly ignored because they're orthogonal to the actual packages. Thoughts? Reasons this won't work that I'm missing? -- Mathnerd314 _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
