Question: use cases for crate2nix generated default.nix about crate2nix HOT 1 CLOSED

Well, I guess this is an open question. My main motivation for crate2nix was making my custom binaries buildable/deployable with nixops. I think that nix has great potential for that because with more work it can then also be used for providing extensive dependencies during test (e.g. postgres). That would e.g. make it trivial to run tests against different versions of postgres prior to a migration.

For nixpkgs, I guess there is a trade-off between the size of the nix expressions and reusing cached dependencies. Also for nixpkgs if only some library dependency or the binary code has changed, it is still nice to only re-build what is necessary. If multiple binaries happen to use the exact same library dependency, it has only to been built once. How often that happens, I don't know. You could obviously do more work to ensure that binaries use the same library versions as long as they are compatible. This would be similar to adding them to one "cargo workspace". Updating their dependencies on the same snapshot of crates.io would probably already go a long way but then we would not use the locked dependencies of the upstream...

Does that make sense? I'd love to hear your opinion.

from crate2nix.