I’ve wanted to be able to segregate a Nix store into a ‘system’ part and a ‘personal’ part, with the idea that the system store contains off-the-shelf software that wouldn’t need to be particularly protected if my computer were stolen, and the personal store contains software that is a privacy risk, IP that I’m obligated to secure, etc.; but where any paths already in the system store could be used by the personal store as needed. If I could do that by making a personal local overlay store over the system store, that would be pretty great, particularly if the stores could be handled differently in the following ways:
| System | Personal | |
|---|---|---|
| Readability | world-readable | user-readable |
| Filesystem | boring and fast | encrypted (with the rest of /home?) |
| Garbage collection | system-defined schedule | different user-defined schedule |
keep-outputs |
no | yes |