Nix flake and dune-project

[bobot]

Would it be interesting to generate nix files (for example a flake) from a dune-project file?

The goal would be for nix users:

• easily get a build environment
• easily create a flake that can be a dependency for other project.

We could integrate it in dune like the (generate_opam_files true).

@vbgl, sorry for mentioning you if you are not interested in such topic.
@rgrinberg

[rgrinberg]

There's the opam-nix project that does this already by going through opam. That seems good enough? Otherwise, we'd need a way to know the URL's of source dependencies which would basically mean re-implementing opam-repository.

Another thing that would really be interesting would be for dune to generate derivations corresponding on dune's rules. That would mean we could piggy back on nix's caching, sandboxing, etc. It wouldn't really be an option for development, but it would be a nice option for distributing OCaml packages.

[Alizter]

I believe opam-nix also has support for dune-projects directly already without the need for opam.