Developer environments / profiles

[MarcCoquand]

A cool feature of Nix is that it allows you to setup local development environment for your software. You specify the packages you want in a shell.nix file. Running nix shell installs the packages listed and then enter you in a new shell with those environment variables. I've found this feature super useful for collaboration or when I revisit old projects.

This feature pairs particularly well with direnv, making it so that your environment variables are automatically update when you enter specific directories, and uncluttering your global namespace.

It doesn't seem impossible to offer something simpler with a slimmed scope for dreckly. I think it could almost be done today, but its maybe not particularly ergonomic:

1. Bootstrap dreckly for each project so you have a separate pkg directory per project, together with direnv you can automatically add the pkg/{bin,sbin} directory to $PATH.
2. Create a project specific meta-pkgs Makefile that you symlink to dreckly, where you add all required development dependencies.

I don't know what the limitations would be with that approach, but if it works then it might be possible to setup some custom tooling to make this extra easy. I'm happy to investigate this but wanted to see if the community has any thoughts about if this makes sense.