Nixpkgs

“there are already a huge amount of packages in the nixpkgs repo”

“One strength of nixpkgs that probably appeals to Arch users too is how much software is available”

“everyone agrees that nixpkgs, independent from any implementation, is the real value of nix.”

“This has a lot of organic complexity to it, coming from multiple contributors, with competing ideas for achieving results.”

“You can rebuild the entire distro from source and backup the source code for every package.”

“as soon as you opt into one part of nixpkgs you end up implicitly opting into large parts of it because of common code in nixpkgs”

“barely-documented cataclysm of packages that extensively bake in assumptions”

“Nixpkgs definitely appears to be the largest and most up-to-date single Linux package repository out there.”

“nixpkgs is basically the largest and most up to date”

“Nixpkgs is the largest package repository across distros by volume”

“the changes that end up in nixpkgs are all reviewed by maintainers”

“bringing in Nix/Nixpkg/Nixos based architecture into the space of bringing in determinism”

“I appreciate the acknowledgement that more software in nixpkgs is not necessarily better.”

“Usually, using the latest stable channel for NixOS and nixpkgs-unstable for the rest is good enough.”

“Nixpkgs is also the largest collection of packages in existence.”

“it still operates at an absurd scale and yet has a higher bar to infiltration with malware”

“a pretty comprehensive monorepo of packages with a more normal review process than the AUR”

“Nixpkgs actually handles this better by having easier ways to make customizations.”

“Anyone with contributor rights can make a fake identity, make a PR with it, then merge their own PR.”

“due to the huge PITA it was to find someone with contributor rights to sign off on it”

“It seems that nixpkgs at least fails to run the extension but more by luck than design.”

“nixpkgs has hashes of the package I'm installing, and is a git repo”

“Installed declaratively, cached across container restarts, no Docker rebuild.”

“I think nixpkgs are a bit overhyped; I've encountered many packages that are abandoned and outdated.”

“half of the technologies grandparent listed are either missing entirely or in a hilariously broken state”

“I often do look at the commit logs and diffs from release to release when reviewing package updates in Nixpkgs”

“I've embraced daily shallow clone/fetches and the burden is now mostly just the 2GB of disk space.”

“a lot of the complexity when dealing with Nix is with the large and organic complexity of nixpkgs”

“I stick to nixpkgs for most of the foundational system tools, lsps, build tools”

“your configuration is all tied to whether the entirety of nixpkgs-unstable is working can be a real headache”

“nixpkgs being a monorepo makes it even better. The code is surprisingly easy to navigate and learn if you've worked in large codebases before”

“I remain an advocate for the huge monorepo of build recipes.”

“the issues given for nixpkgs are actually demonstrating the success of using git as the database”

“Nixpkgs wouldn't have been as successful if it hadn't been using Git”

“that's already more or less what you want, except even the tarball is 46 MB”

“nixpkgs and nix-commands integration with git works quite well and is not an issue”

“Nixpkgs is pretty well organized and I find navigating it not that hard once you read the packaging guidelines.”

“I recently got mirror support upstreamed into Nixpkgs for fetchdarcs & fetchpijul”

“Nixpkgs is generally made by the most pragmatic people and takes a flexible approach to a lot of issues”

“nixpkgs maintainers are hardline purists it takes 15 minutes to compile from source”