Nix seems like it could address some of the issues of other build systems but it itself is a build system. I wonder what the experience of returning to a project set up like this with Nix 3–5 years later is? What sort of stability guarantees does Nix itself offer.
I don’t have any nix powered projects that old, but nix itself gained 1st party support to lock its dependency on nixpkgs semi-recently (nix flakes, they are called) so I expect more stability in the future.
What I expect from nix is to comprehensively lock down all dependencies. For instance, with a package-lock.json file in Node.js, you’re locking JS dependencies, but if some of the packages depend on openssl, that’s implicit, and it will break sooner or later without any clear path on fixing it. If you go all the way with nix, you can even declaratively define the operating system, kernel etc. It may be overkill for most projects, but it’s there in case you need it.
Nix seems like it could address some of the issues of other build systems but it itself is a build system. I wonder what the experience of returning to a project set up like this with Nix 3–5 years later is? What sort of stability guarantees does Nix itself offer.
I don’t have any nix powered projects that old, but nix itself gained 1st party support to lock its dependency on nixpkgs semi-recently (nix flakes, they are called) so I expect more stability in the future.
What I expect from nix is to comprehensively lock down all dependencies. For instance, with a package-lock.json file in Node.js, you’re locking JS dependencies, but if some of the packages depend on openssl, that’s implicit, and it will break sooner or later without any clear path on fixing it. If you go all the way with nix, you can even declaratively define the operating system, kernel etc. It may be overkill for most projects, but it’s there in case you need it.