this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Does nix have access to the AUR?
No.
But Arch supports around 14,000 packages and any branch of Nix has around 100,000 stable and 100,000 unstable packages.
How the fuck does Nix have so many. And who's packaging them all.
Do different versions of the same libraries count as an entry in that seemingly enormous number by any chance ?
I'm sure it's a factor. I don't use Nix but from what I gather the easiest way to run a package is often to add it, and upstream are pretty accepting. The number isn't that wild if you compare it to something like Arch+AUR. Also Nix wants to do it all and replace stuff like pyp and other native package managers, I think pyp alone is responsible for >5000 nixpkgs.
If you are counting different versions then it's hundreds of thousands...and I think you can mix and match them.
If what I hear it's true than once a NixOS user is up and running adding additional packages and up-streaming them appears to be a fairly simple process.
Something like Arch has ~10,000 packages in the main repo and the AUR has ~70,000 packages. It's hard to get something into the Arch repo, very easy to get something into the AUR. NixOS seems like it may be a middle ground where by the time someone can grok the system they should only be a step or two away from contributing to it.
NixOS, package availability is comparable to Arch with the AUR. Arch has a total of about 80-90 thousand packages (That is, the regular repos + the AUR), and NixOS has over 80,000 packages in its own repos, that are actually maintained, and are more up to date than Arch (meanwhile, Arch often has a bunch of outdated and unmaintained packages in the AUR, such as all the Waybar packages that haven't been touched since April (there was a new release in June).
I'm assuming you mean the ability to run an AUR-helper and automagically install from PKGBUILDs; in which case, the answer is no. IMHO, lack of AUR access isn't as big of a deal as it used to be since Flatpak covers a good portion of what I have downloaded from the AUR in the past.