Future of packaging with Nix in light of the coming arrival of dune pkg

[brendanzab]

With the upcoming dune pkg, I was wondering if there had been any thoughts in how it fits in with packaging OCaml projects using Nix? I’ve experimented with using it, and while the user experience is much nicer than opam-nix, it results in duplicated artifacts in the _build directory that might be nicer if they lived in the nix store.

[balsoft]

I haven't played with dune pkg yet, but it looks really promising. I will look at how difficult it would be to make a thing that builds it with Nix. I feel like the architecture would be quite similar to that of opam-nix, but simpler :)

[brendanzab]

Oh nice! If it helps at all with any future work, I was doing some research on the OCaml discussion forum and it seems like the creator of onix also has hopes for it. I also noticed some mentions of nix in this thread. Seems like a lot of them are nodding towards potential future solutions without any concrete plans, but at least it seems like they are keeping it in mind.

Thanks as always for your work on opam-nix, seems like it must have been quite challenging to get it to work!