To be clear: I have extremely high praise for nix, and I'm getting nix-darwin going at work for engineer onboarding. That being said, it feels more like a research project. It pioneers some extremely important ideas and, by necessity, some of those ideas are "bolt-ons" and truly just feel like a proof of concept. Guix, for example, has home-manager built right in and doesn't suffer from the error message issues that home-manager does.
I used Arch, btw, and AUR was truly a thing of beauty. PPAs (of Ubuntu) are, in theory, even better. Have you seen the sheer amount of effort it takes to keep nixpkgs going?[1]
Home-manager, amazing thing that it is, has several issues. From their own documentation:
> Unfortunately, it is quite possible to get difficult to understand errors when working with Home Manager, such as infinite loops with no clear source reference. You should therefore be comfortable using the Nix language and the various tools in the Nix ecosystem.
Flakes? Experimental:
> Nix Flakes are an upcoming feature of the Nix package manager.
I also think it should be possible for the mainline (e.g. nixpkgs) to import a flake: the nixpkgs maintenance nightmare has to end. Dhall can do that, and will even verify it with a hash[2].
They came up with extremely important ideas, but the same ideas taken as a whole (instead of iteratively) could be combined into something far greater.
I guess that the biggest challenge such a project would face is providing a smooth transition for package maintainers: if they have to cut-over or maintain two configs it will be much more difficult to retain them.
So my thought is an that maybe you should use a staged approach where your dhall packaging config design can be compiled down to nix, making it easy for existing nix packages to convert and still be backwards compatible with nix, then develop a dhall-only implementation that consumes the same config but eliminates the intermediate compile-to-nix and evaluate-nix steps. I don't know the design, so this approach may or may not be reasonable.
Regardless, I'm quite interested in a nix-like solution with configs written in Dhall.
