Reliance on nix presents a challenge for long-term sustainability of Core Cardano

[aleeusgr]

As we continue to enhance the developer experience for building on Cardano, we'd like to discuss the use of Nix in our ecosystem. Our goal is to tap into the collective knowledge and expertise of the community to identify potential problems and challenges at the intersection of Nix and Cardano, and to begin framing potential solutions.

• How can Nix help to improve the development experience, and what are the limitations of the current tooling?
• What opportunities exist for using Nix to streamline Cardano development workflows, and what are the key challenges to overcoming?
• What are some common pain points or challenges you've faced when using Nix in your Cardano development workflow?
• How do you see Nix evolving to better support the needs of the Cardano ecosystem in the future?
• What resources or documentation would help make Nix more accessible to new developers in the Cardano community?

Risk:

most Core Cardano projects depend on haskell.nix. This tooling is accessible to a very limited number of people, which will eventually endanger projects sustainability.

Mitigation

add support programs for:

• Contributors to learn haskell.nix

Risk

there are not enough developers in Cardano with level of experience in nix necessary to become contributors and maintainers to haskell.nix

Mitigation:

• support Contributors to participate in nix education and onboarding programs, such as summer of nix

See this Discord thread