I wonder what we can learn from Elpe, especially given the success and appeal of systems that can pull in content from multiple distro package managers. Elpe seems kind of akin to Yocto in that regard:
The way Elpe achieves this is somewhere between Nix and Docker, since base distribution packages (packages from Ubuntu and Debian) are compiled using mostly unmodified upstream build systems, saving a lot of effort to make them strictly reproducible.
One of the friction points I’ve seen in Nix is exactly this. It’s “I have a deb or rpm build system, and I’d like to just lift it straight to Nix.” Can we provide more affordances for doing that, even outside of Nixpkgs?
For deb or rpm ?
That seems solvable with a mkDerivationFromRpm
All the information necessary is encoded in the RPM already.
I read the README but couldn’t quite understand the distinction of the project.
The accompanying blog post has a bit more info compared to the README.