Nix Papercuts Christmas Hackathon

Why spend your run up to Christmas as a shallow consumerist shopping
sardine, when you could help spread the joy of Nix to those trapped in
the darkness of ponderous package-managers and benighted build
systems?

Nix may be hermetic, reproducible, fast, correct and tweakable – but
it is also is prone to give the aspiring acolyte a few paper cuts when
first picking it up.

So let's git rid of some of these sharp corners in Monday's hackathon!
Fewer papercuts make for more and happier converts!

Planned Project:

- Make the installer declarative reproducible and robust, just like
Nix itself. This should help a lot with rolling out and
keeping up-to-date a company-wide nix install.

Other suggested Projects:

- Fix autocannibalistic GC tendencies (nix-build can fail in certain
scenarios because it triggers a mid-way garbage collection of things
needed for the build).
- Binary cache/substituter quality of life improvements (secrets
handling for s3 etc., testing store reachability,
skip-to-next-substitutor-on-reachability-failure option rather than
hard failure or falling back to slow source build).
- Bring and hack your own favourite papercuts!

Food and drink provided!