[windlep]

Disclaimer: I've done some development on Home-Assistant (HASS), and work on the Nabu-Casa cloud service for Home-Assistant. I was contacted by a NixOS core contributor to see if there was a better solution for HASS in NixOS.

This is a bit misleading, a single HASS developer requested their packages not get repackaged because they didn't want the support burden of users who think the software is broken when its actually due to packaging.

Originally on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

Both the GitHub issues have since been closed and settled.

It's useful and important to note that Home-Assistant's turnkey ease-of-use is partly because its acting as a package manager of sorts. When integrations and components are added by the user, their package requirements are downloaded immediately from the Internet and installed. This is quite contrary to the intended operation of NixOS and its immutable and reproducible package installation concept.

This is where the concerns of Frank came in, as a user of HASS on NixOS will likely have a sub-par experience and the documentation on the Internet for HASS will not work correctly for them in many cases. On the other-hand, I'm sure a decent amount NixOS users are probably aware of this (as I was when I was using NixOS daily).

My suggestion (and supported by the HASS founder) was that NixOS repackage HASS and call it something else, like how the code behind Firefox is repackaged without the Firefox name. This way at least NixOS users of it will get more appropriate Google results when searching for an issue related to their install, and are unlikely to burden HASS developers with support issues that are likely related to the install approach and not a HASS issue.

This was back in July of 2021, and I haven't followed up on it since, so I don't know if NixOS is doing this yet, or what the current state is there. But if you're running NixOS and want that turnkey experience, you're not going to get it.

If you want a full turnkey setup I'd highly suggest using HASS OS, whether on a small dedicated device, or in a KVM (https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/).

[eptcyka]

Thank you for clarifying, I couldn't find the relevant issues in the nixpkgs GitHub. I understand your position, however, having used HomeAssistant on NixOS, it was as turn-key as many other of the more complex services that are packaged for NixOS - that is to say, there was a slight whackamole of deducing which dependencies needed to be installed for which plugins. This is something one would expect when using NixOS. I use NixOS for turn-key reproducibility and not turn-key setup, and I don't know of any NixOS user today who'd expect software to work on NixOS out of the box. Not unlike Steam and various other big applications that target specific distros often don't work great as turn-key solutions on the less popular distributions, such as Arch, Gentoo, OpenSUSE and debian derivatives.