nix

I installed Coqide 8.5 w/ nix . Unfortunately, the text is blakc in all panels; there's no syntax highlighting of any kind (otherwise, 8.5 seems a big improvement over 8.4, which I've installed as well). I also get the following: (coqide:17272): GtkSourceView-WARNING **: Unknown parent scheme 'classic' in scheme 'coq_style' (coqide:17272): GtkSourceView-WARNING **: Failed to load '/nix/store/2sxcqfc4q3ls4g2q13n1zwfhnydvgq-coq-8.5pl1/share/coq/coq.lang': could not find the RelaxNG schema file The output of cat ~/.nix-profile/share/coq/coq_style.xml : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

I have a software application that can be built and installed with stack . I would like to offer a binary package as well for Linux and Mac. For this purpose I'm considering nix , since, among other things, it can be used in Linux and Mac. This will save me the trouble of having to maintain two package types. After reading about how nix packages are defined, I would expect that a stack based project could be built with a configuration that would look like: { stdenv, fetchurl, stack }: # we need to depend on stack stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "some-haskell-package-0.1"; builder = ./builder.sh;

In the manual it is written : The command nix-instantiate generates store derivations from (high-level) Nix expressions. But what are store derivations ? The manual says the following about store derivations : A description of a build action. The result of a derivation is a store object. Derivations are typically specified in Nix expressions using the derivation primitive. These are translated into low-level store derivations (implicitly by nix-env and nix-build, or explicitly by nix-instantiate) This is a little bit difficult to understand for a nix-newbee and I found nothing more

As far as I understood, Nix is alternative for cabal sandbox . I finally managed to install Nix, but I still don't understand how it can replace a sandbox. I understand you don't need cabal using Nix and the wrapped version of GHC; however if you want to publish a package you'll need at some point to package it using cabal. Therefore, you need to be able to write and test your cabal configuration within NIX. How do you do that? Ideally, I would like an environment similar to cabal sandbox but "contained" within NIX, is that possible? In fact, what I really would like is the equivalent of