[Nix-dev] Using Nix with external (but 'pure') dependencies

[Ben Darwin]

Hello,

I am new to Nix and am considering it for the following use case and
wonder if it would work,
and, if so, how best to implement it:

We run processing pipelines on two compute clusters.  We control one
of these, but on the other
we use optimized system-wide libraries (e.g., BLAS and LAPACK compiled
with Intel compilers).
The cluster admins install multiple versions of each in fixed
directories and use module(1)
(http://linux.die.net/man/1/module) to allow users to set the appropriate paths.

On both clusters, we use various makefiles/shell scripts to install
multiple versions of our own
software.  We'd like to replace this with Nix expressions for
robustness/reproducibility, but I wonder
whether this makes sense given the need to set some fixed paths rather
than installing the
software from scratch.  (Obviously the Nix expressions for the
cluster's libraries wouldn't be usable
anywhere else, but ideally would supply derivations for cc, blas,
etc., that we could pass to our own
expressions.)

Thanks for any advice.

Ben