What do you as a fail safe when there isnt a flake or nix package for what you need, and you don’t have the time or ability to create it?
Here’s my particular example. I need the beta version of OpenSCAD, which is only delivered as a flatpak in the beta flatpak channel, which I have tried but have been unsuccessful in doing. I havent even attempted building from source. Only the stable version is in nixpkgs. In this case, what would you do?
And in general, what do you do? Install things using a different package manager, like pip, npm, cargo, etc and manage at the user level? Do you run a VM? Docker? Let me know what your backup plan is on NixOS.
I’ll mention some things others haven’t;
Usually, like if a python package isn’t available, you can do half-nix by using something like python venv, and install everything like normal in venv. Or for rust, you get rustup through nix, but then let rustup do its mutable work, instead of literally managing crates through nix. It’s also possible to patch a lot of stuff into a nix shell for inter-op.
When that fails, which it does, then its
- docker
- Tea (author of homebrew wrote it)
- brew/apt
