[Nix-dev] Providing Debian, Arch etc. packages counterproductive?

[Thomas Hunger]

Hi,

Slight ramble ahead.

I've managed to get several people to try Nix after constantly raving about
it and all but one had a bad experience. The reason AFAICT is that they
first check for nix in their default package tool (apt-get, pacman, ...).
These packages install nix-*  binaries but they don't help with the single
or multi-user /nix setup. So the first thing they see is "error: creating
directory ‘/nix’: Permission denied".

I can think of two solutions 1) make the packages set up nix correctly so
nix-env is usable out of the box and 2) Remove all custom packages and tell
people to use the installer script.

I know 2 is quite radical but to me it seems preferable to leaving people
who aren't necessarily great unix admins googling for an error with no
solution on the first results page.

~


[1]
https://nixos.org/wiki/Installing_Nix_on_Debian
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