[Nix-dev] Moving some of the NixOS setup to nixpkgs

[Wout Mertens]

Hi all,

TL;DR: I'd like to discuss the empty space between declarative NixOS
systems and imperative nix-env user profiles.


As we all know, nixpkgs provides compiled packages and NixOS ties them
together with environment variables, configuration files and systemd
services.

This dichotomy causes a bit of a problem for user environments, especially
on nixpkgs installs outside NixOS.

Examples are the environment variables TZDIR, CURL_CA_BUNDLE,
OPENSSL_X509_CERT_FILE and others, which are in place for NixOS users but
not for nixpkgs users. Without these, glibc and curl don't work 100% right.
Plain nixpkgs installs should have these set in the user environment
somehow.

Another issue, is that configuration files are only generated for NixOS
services. So if you as a user want to use nginx on an unprivileged port for
development, you need to generate the configuration by hand instead of just
specifying a port and getting a wrapper.

One more related topic is declarative user environments. You can do it [1],
but it's a bit of a hidden feature and not very straightforward.

So I'm hoping that we can come up with a system where:

   - configuration wrappers are in nixpkgs, and NixOS modules use those.
   - multiple configurations of a package become multiple wrappers with
   user-definable names
   - environment variables like TERMINFO are declared in nixpkgs instead of
   NixOS modules and synthesized into the user environment instead of via NixOS
   - declarative user environments are made as easy as possible. Perhaps it
   should be the default and nix-env only edits the declaration.

Thoughts please!

Wout.

[1]:
https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_develop_software_on_nixos#Obtaining_an_Environment_from_a_Custom_Definition
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