Infinite flexibility for reproducible commercial packaging of dirt permutations.
Packaging system pain exists at the border of chaos and simulated order.
There are useful concepts in Yocto but they were never formalized in academic papers, unlike some build systems for Haskell. There are packaging nuances encoded in bitbake recipes that will likely die there because they work "enough", instead of being further studied for long term lessons.
Given that shellcheck is written in Haskell, it might be an interesting academic exercise to write a Haskell replacement for bitbake, which converts bitbake recipes (shell+python) into something more maintainable.
Yocto is significantly better than what proceeded it. I could fill a book on ways it has pushed the envelope for embedded development.
Is Yocto a steaming pile? Yes absolutely. But it remains a means to an end.
I'd struggle to accomplish with Nix what can be accomplished out of the box with Yocto. Now that being said I'd certainly try and use Nix over Yocto any day of the week.
I remain optimistic and that the two will converge and it will more or less not matter, though I'd much prefer Nix to consume embedded development than Yocto become Nix-pilled.
