Nix is React for system configuration.

So… over-engineered and expensive to maintain?

Overengineered? Maybe, depending on your use case. NixOS is pretty popular as a desktop OS within the community, for example, and I could see a case that its guarantees and strictures are overkill there.

But maintenance is really easy. You're basically never forced to rewrite or throw away tons of config. Doing literally years worth of updates at once is typically pretty painless. (Adding new packages to Nixpkgs or new features to NixOS can range from trivial to very hard, just depends on the details.)

I tried using NixOS a few years ago. Everything went fine, except Python packages. There has been quite a lot of incompatibilities, sadly.

poetry2nix: https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix

mach-nix: https://github.com/DavHau/mach-nix

dream2nix: https://nix-community.github.io/dream2nix/guides/getting-sta...

pynixify: https://github.com/cript0nauta/pynixify

pip2nix: https://github.com/nix-community/pip2nix

The tools available to you at the time (pypi2nix and maybe python2nix, if it was a long time ago) have been abandoned in favor of the newer tools, I think chiefly poetry2nix but I'm not sure.

There's still the Nixpkgs buildPythonPackage stuff, I think, if your goal is to upstream a lib into Nixpkgs. But if you just want to build your own Python applications and vendorize the deps (e.g., for work), you might try one of the tools above, which weren't available 3+ years ago.

dream2nix is by the author of mach-nix IIRC and has the goal of establishing a unified standard and codebase for ${proglang}2nix type package generators. But mach-nix is still maintained and might be the more feature-complete choice between them.

Maybe Nix-y Python users and developers can reply with some of their experiences using those tools for real projects :)