[Nix-dev] Managing users, configuration files and filesystem mounts.

[Jason Dusek]

  I am curious as to how Nix manages users and groups outside of
  NixOS. In perusing the NGinX derivation, for example, it's not
  clear to me that one ever creates a user `nginx'.

  Is this just not usually done with Nix? It seems reasonable
  that this is not possible, due to Nix's stated goals of
  purity.

  An alternative way I thought of is to create a `local-shadow'
  derivation that creates `/etc/passwd' and so on. However,
  these files would never leave the Nix store! So I am stuck
  again.

  While NixOS is appealing, I can't move my systems to it right
  this minute -- I'm looking at managing CentOS boxen. Maybe
  I'll have to use Bcfg2 or Puppet for the time being to manage
  users and other system global configuration.

--
Jason Dusek