Nix provides declarative, reproducible builds. So, ostensibly, if you had your build system using Nix, then some of the issues here go away.
Unfortunately, Nix is also not how most people function. You have to do things the Nix way, period. The value in part comes from this strong opinion, but it also makes it inherently niche. Most people do not want to learn an entire new language/paradigm just so they can get this feature. And so it becomes a chicken and egg problem. IMHO, I think it also suffers from a little bit of snobbery and poor naming (Nix vs. NixOS vs. Nixpkgs) which makes it that much harder to get traction.
Nix, if not used incorrectly (and they really make it hard to use it, both correctly and incorrectly lol), gives you reproducible and verifiable builds.
Unfortunately I have to agree with the sibling comment that it suffers from poor naming and the docs are very hard to grok which makes it harder to get traction.
I really hate the idea of `it's all sales at the end of the day` but if Nix could figure how to "sell" itself to more people then we would probably have less of those problems.
Nix provides declarative, reproducible builds. So, ostensibly, if you had your build system using Nix, then some of the issues here go away.
Unfortunately, Nix is also not how most people function. You have to do things the Nix way, period. The value in part comes from this strong opinion, but it also makes it inherently niche. Most people do not want to learn an entire new language/paradigm just so they can get this feature. And so it becomes a chicken and egg problem. IMHO, I think it also suffers from a little bit of snobbery and poor naming (Nix vs. NixOS vs. Nixpkgs) which makes it that much harder to get traction.
There are different notions of "reproducible". Nix does not automatically make builds reproducible in the way that matters here:
https://reproducible.nixos.org
It is still good at that but the difference to other distros is rather small:
https://reproducible-builds.org/citests/
Nix, if not used incorrectly (and they really make it hard to use it, both correctly and incorrectly lol), gives you reproducible and verifiable builds.
Unfortunately I have to agree with the sibling comment that it suffers from poor naming and the docs are very hard to grok which makes it harder to get traction.
I really hate the idea of `it's all sales at the end of the day` but if Nix could figure how to "sell" itself to more people then we would probably have less of those problems.