microphone987

This comment is really, really confusing. If it builds once Nix, it will build again with Nix... If you can find a derivation that builds on one machine and not on the other there's usually a fundamental difference - either in CPU arch, your nixpkgs config differs (overlays), etc. Or I guess you could write a build script that non-deterministic ally fails, but that has nothing to do with Nix's maturity.

Nix ensures the tooling is called the same. I can understand having a non-autotools project that is more difficult to write a derivation for, but "Nix can't wrangle messy libraries" makes absolutely no sense, either from a "make compiling reliable" or anything at use-time.

Do you have a specific example in mind that is less hand-wavy?