The nixpkgs community is then responsible for making sure that the build compiles on all platforms. It's not just for C code either, nix files can be used to declare any kind of dependency. It's a full blown declarative, functional, domain specific programming language for packages. So your project can depend on haskell or python code and everything just works.
There's a heavy linux focus right now but there's a whole group of people making the packages work nicely on osx and cygwin. Check it out: http://nixos.org/nix/
Yup, it works in conjunction with other build tools. nix knows how to build make projects, cmake projects, cabal, etc. This is what allows you to depend on pretty much anything. Then I just use nix-build and it will build all the dependencies in a virtual environment and symlink the result when its finished.
I don't think we need another build system, what we really want is a package manager that knows how to fetch and build dependencies and gets out of your way. This is why people like npm. This is why nix is awesome.
The nixpkgs community is then responsible for making sure that the build compiles on all platforms. It's not just for C code either, nix files can be used to declare any kind of dependency. It's a full blown declarative, functional, domain specific programming language for packages. So your project can depend on haskell or python code and everything just works.
There's a heavy linux focus right now but there's a whole group of people making the packages work nicely on osx and cygwin. Check it out: http://nixos.org/nix/