Re: Add a Nix flake

On Tue Aug 26, 2026 at 1:28 PM CDT, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I don't know. Over time, people made similar arguments about Homebrew,
> Docker, and there will be more after this. People who are interested in
> this can band together and maintain it among themselves.

The Homebrew/Docker comparison is fair, those didn't go in-tree and so
perhaps this shouldn't either.

> A Nix configuration is probably of interest to on the order of 1% of
> developers, whereas these other things are relevant to most developers,
> and also importantly, changes can be verified easily by anyone, without
> having to learn about some new platform or tool.

I don't have numbers, and 1% is as plausible as anything I could claim.
Also, the comparison with .editorconfig/CI wasn't fair, that file is
near-universal and this isn't.

The second half is the argument I take most seriously, and I think it's the
real crux: a committer without Nix installed can't verify or fix a change to
flake.nix, so it's a file most of the tree's maintainers can't touch.

It puts the burden squarely on the people who want this to actually show
up, and it means the tree would be carrying something its own committers
can't independently check.

So, let's let the thread decide. If more Nix-using contributors don't
materialize I'm content to manage it out-of-tree.

Separately, and regardless of where this ends up: Tristan, thanks, I took
your docs suggestion. Since the Meson docs targets aren't built by default,
I've enabled the docs feature by default, which brings the DocBook toolchain
into the dev shell via the package itself and leaves just ccache in the
shell's own list. v5 attached.

best.

-greg