What do you as a fail safe when there isnt a flake or nix package for what you need, and you don’t have the time or ability to create it?
Here’s my particular example. I need the beta version of OpenSCAD, which is only delivered as a flatpak in the beta flatpak channel, which I have tried but have been unsuccessful in doing. I havent even attempted building from source. Only the stable version is in nixpkgs. In this case, what would you do?
And in general, what do you do? Install things using a different package manager, like pip, npm, cargo, etc and manage at the user level? Do you run a VM? Docker? Let me know what your backup plan is on NixOS.
I think would just try to compile it from source. Using a different package manager seems very weird. I suspect getting the source to build on nixOS is more or less equivalent in terms of effort than to create a derivation. I have done so in the past and I ended up pushing them to nixpkgs. If compiling is out of the question, I guess docker but I havn’t had to do that, yet.