I spent a lot of time trying to package Pants for NixOS but it's pretty untenable. I can't find a major distro Pants is packaged for, if anybody knows one, that would help. scie-pants and the pants self-updating and self-installing mechanisms are incredibly cool, but being unable to easily build a tarball with a single-versioned ./pants script or binary that doesn't download and install and version packages on it's own is really a blocker. Interesting relevant blog post on the subject from Drew Devault - hope it can influence some future decisions in Pants development. https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.html

We have a discussion about Nix: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/discussions/19537 - any tangible insights from there? Anything to add? We also have this: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/blob/main/shell.nix - but I believe that's on "Pants development" side, rather than the Pants deployment side? I haven't used Nix (yet), so unfortunately, that's the extent of what I've got on the matter