To recap: the Nix devenv ({default,shell,flake}.nix and friends) in Scylla is a nicer (for those who consider it so, that is) alternative to dbuild: a completely deterministic build environment without Docker.
In theory we could support much more (creating installable packages, container images, various deployment affordances, etc. -- Nix is, among other things, a kind of parallel-to-everything-else devops realm) but there is clearly no demand and besides duplicating the work the release team is already doing (and doing just fine, needless to say) would be pointless and wasteful.
This PR reflects the accumulated changes that I have been carrying locally for the past year or so. The version currently in master _probably_ can still build Scylla, but that Scylla certainly would not pass unit tests.
What the previous paragraph seems to mean is, apparently I'm the only active user of Nix devenv for Scylla. Which, in turn, presents some obvious questions for the maintainers:
- Does this need to live in the Scylla source at all? (The changes to non-Nix-specific parts are minimal and unobtrusive, but they are still changes)
- If it's left in, who is going to maintain it going forward, should more users somehow appear? (I'm perfectly willing to fix things up when alerted, but no timeliness guarantees)
Closes#9557
* github.com:scylladb/scylladb:
nix: add README.md
build: improvements & upgrades to Nix dev environment
build: allow setting SCYLLA_RELEASE from outside
f4540ef0d6