Rename project to distinguish from the Nix ecosystem

[Profpatsch]

This probably needs a decision before 1.0. My suggestion: Either close this issue and leave the name, or rename the project. Just ignoring the issue doesn't make it go away. :/

Originally posted by @tbu- in #76 (comment)

Now, two years later and before 1.0 of this project, it is time to bring this up again.

The Nix package manager has 6.5k commits from about 200 contributors and is used as a base of operations by thousands of developers and multiple dozens of companies.

The Nix packages collection has 175k commits from about 2000 contributors, is on par with APT-based distributions when it comes to the numbers of packages, and even beats most other distributions when it comes to the numbers of up-to-date packages.

We have seen increased euphoria in the nix community to embrace Rust for new tooling, for example our CI is written in Rust, and main contributors said they would use Rust (instead of C++) for future tooling efforts. This means crates.io is going to see an influx of crates containing nix in their name, most of them from/for the package manager I assume.

[asomers]

Name collisions are unfortunate. But renaming Nix to avoid conflicts with NixOS is, at the very least, premature because I can't find a single NixOS-related package in crates.io. Nix, OTOH, is a very popular crate.

It has been suggested to split Nix up into a number of smaller packages. If we ever do that, then we could discuss renaming Nix at the same time. But nobody is seriously working on that.
See #190 .

[aszlig]

@asomers: Just bumped into this again, looking for Nix (not *nix, the package manager) bindings. Is it at least possible to give it a more distinctive synopsis to make sure it's not about bindings for the Nix package manager?

[asomers]

You mean like in the Cargo description? What would you suggest?

[aszlig]

@asomers: Hm, maybe something like Rust friendly bindings to POSIX C library calls?