regnat

You can install Nix in a totally unprivileged fashion, without having to use hacks such as PRoot, you just need to configure it to use a directory you have write access to instead of /nix. But doing so breaks the ability to use the official binary caches (because relocating the store requires recompiling packages), and this isn't particular to nix (I remember that portage at least does this too, and probably some others). The interesting part is that with an installed deamon, the admin can allow users to install packages in their own profile, while still benefiting from sharing of dependencies and other niceties.

About the multiple versions, the problem with "classical" package managers is that you have to do some manual renaming to ensure that both versions won't be installed in the same place in the file-system, which is tedious and doesn't scale well. Furthermore you may encounter some problems because both will be visible at the same time if the packager isn't careful enough. For example, if a software X has a dependency of libfoo2.1 and you happen to have libfoo3.1 also installed, the installation script for X may use libfoo3.1 instead of libfoo2.1, in which case you risk to encounter bugs because X hasn't been tested against libfoo3.1.

Well... This is a sort of whitespace sensitivity, and I don't really like it, because that means that some tokens may or may not be meaningful depending on the context, which increases the complexity of the syntax -- and syntax is probably the first thing that I think should be dumb simple and predictable.

Thanks, it should be fixed now

I see. But that means using a whitespace-sensitive syntax, which some people (including me ;) ) don't really like

The only place where I think we could make the semicolons optional is at the end of a let-binding or a record (like json does iirc), which would indeed be a small but blessed change.

For the array litterals, I don't really see which improvements your syntax brings (except suppressing the space-separated list, which conflicts with the syntax for function application). Is it used somewhere else ?

My tool could, but (for now, at least) it is a separate project from the main Nix interpreter, and this one is notably slow to evolve

Unfortunately no, except maybe for some very minor tweaks that have a chance to be included in vanilla nix, but otherwise this would most probably either mean the death of this project or a split in the (already small) community, which I both don't want to see

Hi, author here. While I agree that the language could be improved, I wonder why you say that this makes it uglier, and how you'd imagine a better solution (this is still in development, and any idea is welcome).