So my initial goal was to load quarkus-cli directly from shell.nix (not sure about the difference between quarkus and quarkus-cli, I thought that quarkus was providing also the quarkus-cli) to have reproducible builds while developing an app. My first attempt was to try to package it and it fails, but meanwhile I found other solutions by directly downloading the .jar or using jbang as explained here. This solution is good enough for my need (it’s even better than packaging from source as I don’t need to recompile quarkus), however I’m “theoretically” annoyed by the fact that I can’t build quarkus from source using Nix, and this post aims to find solutions/document how to deal with the above errors I got (as I’m sure I’m not alone).
More generally, I think that NixOS is definitely a great tool for regular users and managing servers (and it would certainly be hard for me to use another distro later), but my experience of using NixOs for developing is more mitigated. I find myself always fighting with build tools. This post is one example I can show, but for instance I still don’t know 4 months later how to compile an electron app! Given how javascript and java are widely used, I’m afraid that this kind of issue will make NixOS unpopular among developers. That’s why I think that it would be really important to provide robust documentations and solutions (potentially automatized where the users just specifies the language that they are coding with) to help developers to code on NixOS and with nix tools.