Rene Donner

That would be absolutely fantastic! I am dreaming of a system where I could define a .nix expression in my project, nix-shell into it, and have julia, all the packages...

just a gentle bump ;-)

Nix does build from source, but has a binary cache at nixos.org, so in most cases you dont actually need to build things. But as the absolute path is part...

I do agree that the multiple providers are a bit cumbersome. We have support for apt, yum and pacman as they are the underlying managers for debian, centos and arch....

Yes, exactly what you are saying. In theory it would even allow us to use it as sole BinDeps provider for linux distros + OSX, but OSX support, while present,...

Yes, Nix should only be used when apt/yum/pacman are not available, so `BuildProcess` sounds good: Depending on whether the user installed it in `/nix` or not it will transparently install...

Yes, once nix (similarly Guix) is installed by root, individual users can do whatever they want without interference and get the benefit of binary downloads. Just like you are saying,...

@staticfloat Yes, https://github.com/timholy/HDF5.jl/pull/177, but I can try with more packages (I want to add that to as many packages as possible anyway) and see how well it works? Also, I...

Sounds good, I'll try that during the next couple of days - thanks for the pointers!

Sure, I'll include the default behavior for install. I was not aware that BinDeps should not be needed at runtime, I'll try to refactor that so that it still works.