I recently wanted to try out (aider)[https://aider.chat], and ran into a problem that I continually run into: how do I install one-off, experimental software into my environment, without being a nix master, or spending an extreme amount of time on every new package.

In this case, it is a new python package available in pip. It isn’t available in nixpkgs, and isn’t nixified. pip2nix doesn’t work on arm64 Macs (bug here)[https://github.com/nix-community/pip2nix/issues/88], so I can’t use that to try and create a flake that works with this package. It isn’t using poetry, so poetry2nix is out.

How are you dealing with this problem? Are you all experts in nix, and writing flakes for every piece of software that you want to play around with? Do you have a “dirty” part of your environment that you install this kind of stuff into? (I looked into using pipx to install this, however that (also has a bug)[https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/171429] in nixpkgs.)

Thoughts?

  • rutrum@lm.paradisus.dayEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is one of those times I would throw my hands up and look at virtualization instead. Containerization with docker/podman is an option. I recall some time ago there was a utility that sort of embeded different distributions within your own, and you could run commands natively on the host machine but in the environment of the VM. I might also be confusing that with VanillaOS or BlendOS features that have that built in to the OS. APX is VanillaOS’s package manager that might be another option, although its getting messy at this point.