Yeah, my nix-darwin config is pretty nice and perfectly hermetic and reproducible, save for a now-growing list of casks in my brew.nix that looks like this:

> 1password # breaks in nix, must go in /Applications folder

> softwareB # not available in nixpkgs

> softwareC # available in nixpkgs, but because nixpkgs maintainers are hardline purists it takes 15 minutes to compile from source and ain't nobody got time for that

> softwareD # ostensibly available in nixpkgs, but the package is completely broken (more general case of 1password)

Why not wrap the binaries yourself in flake.nix you say? Well, sure, would love to, if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to do so for each one and keep them up to date.

> softwareC # available in nixpkgs, but because nixpkgs maintainers are hardline purists it takes 15 minutes to compile

What actually happened is that non free software may not be legal to distribute from nixpkgs caches, so you're on your own with building those. That's not really a purist approach.

Brew-Nix might be able to cover some of those gaps, but probably not all of them. But almost certainly SoftwareC, at least!

https://github.com/BatteredBunny/brew-nix