This isn't what I was talking about, I'm all for being as pure as possible, dial the reproducibility and isolation to the max. Unfortunately, Nix itself as an application is not isolated. It requires a unique installation process to be available for users, because it wants to manage its store at the root level (/nix/store/), but I hear the situation is different on macOS. Applications packaged with Nix also require special treatment to run in Nix environment, with paths rewritten and binaries patched to support Nix filesystem structure instead of the traditional Linux one.
> Applications packaged with Nix also require special treatment to run in Nix environment, with paths rewritten and binaries patched to support Nix filesystem structure instead of the traditional Linux one.
If you fully package it. If you use something like an buildFHSUserEnv[0] that's not true.
There is also nix-autobahn and nix-alien for automatically running foreign binaries on a more ad-hoc basis or to generate a starting point for packaging.
