Why use nix when pkg-src has been available on Darwin for over 15 years, boasts more packages, and has decades of support (plus Jonathan Perkin and the guys over at Joyent)? Why people assume the gross project known as homebrew (and the better macports, where homebrew gets all of their real package patches) are the only two package managers on OS X/Darwin is perplexing to me... Not to say nix is not interesting, but still. The OS X open source/package community would be insanely better if it was solely centralized around pkg-src.
Hmm.. I've never tried pkg-src before. I'll give it a try.
Step 1: I have to download a gig of stuff before I can install any packages? Even though my drive is big nowadays, that still seems like a bit of a waste...
Step 2: Let's try building a package, the last thing I installed with homebrew.
> cd math/minisat
> make install clean
Makefile:27: *** missing separator. Stop.
> make
Makefile:27: *** missing separator. Stop.
Hmm.. this isn't the most user-friendly system...
UPDATE: I have to use the bmake I bootstrapped, didn't realise (and the quick-start docs didn't mention it). Now building begins, but the executable doesn't link.
use the `pkgin` binary to install binaries built from joyent... (https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/packages/Darwin/) No need to clone the package tree. This fixes step 1. `sudo bmake install clean` fixes step two.... (opt needs superuser permissions). see the joyent link in particular to see how easy it is to install pre-compiled binary packages with pkgin
Maybe against monoculture and user experience with pkg-src on OSX was very bad for years. Nix introduces modern concepts that pkg-src will never have without complete rewrite ... so we need to look forward
https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/
http://github.com/cmacrae/saveosx