At my first job in a ruby shop, I had to install ruby gems by hand. God knows which version would get installed. Luckily, Bundler became the standard and Gemfile.lock made it possible to create reproducible environment. Soon nearly all the languages started to have lock file variants. But for some reason, that stopped at language library level. Any dependency on OS package level like imagemagick, mysql-client etc are still managed by hand in most cases. Nix is trying to tackle the problem, I have been trying to convert people to use nix shell, I add shell.nix in most projects nowadays. Nix Flakes seem to be the ideal as it locks the version as well, but it has been in beta for a long time and I am yet to find good documentation. Meanwhile, everybody else seems to see the potential and starting to build on top of nix. I am hoping somebody will solve this problem, we would waste less time debugging build failures and claiming it works on my machine.
1: https://devenv.sh/
2: An invitation to Rust maintainers
3: GitHub - jetify-com/devbox: Instant, easy, and predictable development environments · GitHub
