[Nix-dev] Want to build a package manager for OS X using Nix as its core

[Tianyi Cui]

Hello everyone,

Background: I am a developer of Homebrew
(http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/), which is advertised as "The
missing package manager for OS X". Homebrew is written entirely in
Ruby, both the core part and the building scripts part. Since many
programmers in OSX platform are formilar with Ruby, we have lots of
contributors. Currently 807 persons have contributed patches, 1314
packages in total, and we're getting a bunch of new package
submissions everyday.

(Disclaimer: What I said is on behalf of myself not the Homebrew project.)

I'm considering using Nix as the core of Homebrew. But we certainly
won't switch to the Nix expression language (which is great too) to
write the build script. So my question is: is it possible to use Nix
and all its great purely functional features without changing the way
we write our building script? I also hope the new core with Nix as its
dependency can contain as little C as possible, so our users can help
improve it.

I found another project related to Nix called Hack-Nix, which use Nix
as a package manager for Haskell. So I think the answer to my first
question should be "yes it's possible". Then my questions are:

* Where do I start? What should I read and learn?
* How hard is it? Does Nix have a clear and stable API in addition with the CLI?
* Is there any other examples I can learn from? Other package manager
using Nix as its core? Other software using Nix as a library?
* Is there any other suggestions/information you can provide?

The world of Nix is entirely new for me so my questions can be silly.
Thank you in advance!

--
Best Regards,
崔添翼 (Tianyi Cui, a.k.a. dd_engi)
tianyicui at gmail.com
+86 13958103659 (It's a prime number!)
http://www.google.com/profiles/tianyicui