Comment by jchw

I think the only reason why Nixpkgs has a derivation for Ladybird is because it is not really possible to build Ladybird (or really almost any software) the "obvious" way in NixOS. What Nixpkgs provides is more like build recipes that work within Nix's sandboxed environment with optionally cached binaries, rather than actual packages. Because of that, it's kind of awkward: no specific decision is ever made to publish packages for some unfinished software, it's just that the act of writing a derivation kind of implicitly does do that.

Clearly, some upstreams do not appreciate that NixOS provides non-standard or sometimes-unfinished versions of their software, but it's either that or the software is essentially unusable and uncompilable on NixOS.

I do wonder if there is a potential for productive compromise, though. Maybe it would be desirable to have a QMessageBox warning to the user at startup that the distribution is unsupported and bugs should not be reported upstream. I think that the folks maintaining the Ladybird derivation would be happy to take feedback into account.