The worst case that comes to mind was iOS development. In that case there was supposedly packaging available that leveraged the Xcode cli, but it had ceased to be maintained and once I started fixing stuff, I began running into even deeper issues that made me question whether it ever truly worked.

In other cases it was things like mach-nix not working for certain Python packages, and evidently a refusal to upstream something like mach-nix that tried to work with default Python packaging upstream, and the default Python API being a mess to work with.

Thus in the latter case while from the nix POV nothing in nixpkgs was “broken”, it working as designed left me choosing between investing large amounts of time to figure out how to implement a derivation for the third-party Python script I wanted to work on or dealing with third-party tools. And I expected all that to be a rathole too. I wasn’t looking to push some tooling on the third-party maintainer or develop something I’d just throw away, I wanted to add a relatively simple feature. As it was I wound up spending the free time I had troubleshooting package management and ran out of time to actually get work done. I did file an issue with mach-nix, but the person who helped me also ran into problems.

https://github.com/DavHau/mach-nix/issues/560

This kind of “brokenness in depth” is exactly what I ran into when I tried to troubleshoot and fix nixpkg’s iOS support over a few months.

I have actually contributed a couple packages back, and I wrote a brew-like derivation adapter that may or may not still work on one of my macOS devices that worked with standard macOS installers/install archives (copy to Applications folder), but that got broken by an upstream update and fixing it became involved. Iirc whatever I did do to fix it made it unsuitable to upstream, and when I did get another macOS device, I didn’t even try to use nix for applications that weren’t immediately supported.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/feedback-darwin-installapplica...

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/second-overlay-not-seeing-chan...

Most recently I tried to create an Ubuntu container with USB forwarding under NixOS. Once again: bespoke solution, scant documentation, and GPT-4o got confused. I failed, and spent less time copying my files off and installing Ubuntu than I did trying to get it to work under NixOS.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1ga6dbe/comment/ltce...

So this isn’t just one-off packages being broken that a maintainer needs to fix. It’s a deeply pervasive thing with the entire nix ecosystem that requires the community to internalize a need to make things work obviously and on the first try for common use cases.

I don’t know anybody whose problem is “people want to pay me to work on nix with no other output product to the work other than more nix”, so I can’t recommend nix to anybody as a solution. You can’t solve a problem with more problems. And after the container incident, I’m truly lost as to what people ARE doing with nix besides just developing nix, because I thought it was supposed to be most popular in Devops contexts.

And yet the very last thing I would entrust to nix at this point would be a production service whose infrastructure needs to be completely understood and rapidly fixable, because the abysmal documentation means a minor outage could turn into a major catastrophe while people google for some obscure forum post or decipher nixpkgs layer by layer.

/rant