I think there is room for improvement for installing and using nixpkgs on another distribution.
I see two big problems: 1. installation 2. environment variables Installation: ======== The single-user installation is cute, but realistically you need root anyway to create /nix so it would be nice if there was a script that set up the proper environment, with the correct permissions under /nix/var/nix, the system-wide shell profiles, nixbld users, a users-that-are-allowed-to-use-nix-env group and the nix-daemon startup script for the popular distros. Right now you need to manually do these things, and some are not obvious like having to change your ~/.nix-profile dir to a per-user one (/etc/profile.d/nix.sh points it to /nix/var/nix/profiles/default which doesn't exist, and nix-env -i doesn't seem to handle that case). The end goal should be "run this script and you'll have full access to everything in Nixpkgs with per-user profiles and secure defaults". All barriers to adoption should be removed as much as possible. Environment Variables: ================= There are several packages that rely on environment variables to work correctly, like glibc ($TZ_DIR) and curl ($CURL_CA_BUNDLE). Those aren't defined when you're not on NixOS. For the regular $NIX_PATH, $PATH etc, sourcing nix.sh from /etc/profile isn't enough, because for example ssh doesn't start a bash login shell. For those cases, it needs to be sourced from /etc/bash.bashrc as well. Similar issues are probably happening with tcsh, zsh etc. Thoughts? Wout.
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