Developing and packaging Linux apps on NixOS - TisVlay

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Hey folks, for about 10 months or so been working on a hobby project just to get more practice in Linux application packaging, the Rust ecosystem/utilities, and software development on Nix and NixOS (as well as solve some personal pain points in using a HDMI TVs and projectors with PCs). Disclosure: this project includes AI assisted development, documentation and research, and has been a great help given my physical disabilities in typing.

I’m posting here as while project isn’t still fully stable, it’s daily drivable and fully documented, and I feel other Nix users aren’t too shy of beta software. While the pedantic app code may not be much to write home about, I’d be curious here on feedback of my nix packing approach, use of flakes for development and distribution, dev shell setup, and systemd services & permissions.

The app itself follows more of a distributed pub/sub architecture (my background is in robotics and cyber-physical system design, not desktop software), so converging on IPC and middle-ware libraries I’ve been meaning to experiment while keeping the installable setup self contained was a balance.

I’ve also adopted Cachix into the release pipeline (sparing my poor laptop and RPi from building the arm binaries with every release), but would be interested in finding other (Rust?) projects making use of Nix in CI for development to learn from, as that remains a large gap in GitHub Actions setup that still imperatively Ubuntu based.

Links to the rendered docs and source repo (NixOS install instruction included if you’d like to try it).

Cheers,
Ruffin

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Be aware that we have an LLM Policy, where projects are expected to disclose when they made substantial use of LLMs. Taking a look at your source, I believe that would apply here.

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Oh, thanks. Looks like a recent policy since I last posted on this forum. Updated my OP.

Btw, would you know of an automated approach for tracking of LLM contributions in dependencies? TisVlay uses cargo-about for generating the attribution disclosure and acknowledgments of shipped third party licenses composed from its software build of materials. Would there be an equivalent for disclosure of LLM content in the entire SBOM or nix closure, useful for static taint analysis.

I’m thinking perhaps an extension to the SPDX specification to communicate AI assisted contributions that could been imbedded in TisVlay’s public crates to additionally propagate disclosure through downstream SBOMs?

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