[Nix-dev] Using Nixpkgs outside of NixOS

[Wout Mertens]

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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