[Nix-dev] nixos principles

[Roderick Ford]

As an introduction to NixOS, a newly interested person may try to install
NixOS in VirtualBox or VMWare.  (In fact, a co-worker of mine could not get
the NixOS live cd to install in VirtualBox, or VMWare, so he gave up.)

Now, if VirtualBox hosts a NixOS guest, and we run the
VirtualBox-GuestAdditions from the host, the automatically mounted iso has
a shell script and a hybrid shell script.  Opening that up, after it fails
to complete, I found that it does not support NIXOS specifically.

So, my question is:
As a matter of "nixos principles", would we want to go out of our way to
make a "special" package or adaptation for a package?  It seems like NixOS
principles would suggest we do NEITHER of the following:

1. the package trying to run is from the host machine, not the NixOS
machine. Therefore, it seems more likely to be fixable by pursuing Oracle
with an edit suggestion, but extremely unlikely to happen soon.
2. nixos could provide a "new package" ... something like
"VirtualBox-LinuxAdditions" which contains the customized package.  We would
then be "creating custom NixOS packages" rather than creating "configuration
wrappers for existing packages".

Roderick Ford
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