[kylewlacy]

I think garn is really cool! If I were still in the Nix ecosystem, garn would probably be my go-to

Building something on Nix obviously has a ton of benefits: well-proven tooling, lots of mindshare already, TONS of packages. Everyone knows that Nix-the-language is fairly unintuitive for beginners, and tools like garn, Devenv, Devbox, etc. all seem to be trying to let folks use Nix without exposing them to Nix-the-language. I think this is a good goal to have and helps make Nix more accessible

But I really thought it was worth exploring the Nix-free design space too. For example, I think derivations in Nix are... kinda complicated and weird! Having a fixed set of phases specifically designed for autotools builds always seemed a little weird to me. By ditching Nix, I was able to see what the world looks like when you ditch the idea of phases completely, for example

Another interesting one was ditching the absolute path for the store path. Getting everything working by resolving relative paths was surprisingly tricky, but the end result is that you don't need to be root to install Brioche, and you can also take a Brioche-built binary (along with the resource dir it outputs) and ship it to another Linux machine and it'll just work. That's only something you can do if you see what happens if you explore outside the Nix space

So I'm hoping Brioche can _at least_ be an interesting case study in how you can take a lot of Nix's ideas and get a lot of the same value without having to take Nix's approach directly (or who knows-- maybe some of those ideas end up back in Nix someday!)