Missing services?

[emptyflask]

I was trying to match the environment I had with Homebrew, got stuck on a warning about services.memcached not existing, then noticed there is a very limited number of services in this repo.

How should I go about running services for couchdb, dnsmasq, elasticsearch, memcached, or nginx?

Am I missing something? Do we need users to import services from mainline Nix and convert systemd to launchd?

[abathur]

I don't think you're missing anything (aside perhaps from finding a user repo with a launchd service definition for any of those). I think you're correct about importing and translating essential services.

No authority on the topic, but the narrative I built in my head while reading around is roughly:

• There are hundreds of potentially-portable services defined for nixos, but fewer darwin-specific developers limit the viability of a wholesale translation effort and the ongoing maintenance load. Much as in nixpkgs, someone wanting an addition enough to write it themselves is a good razor for whether it's worth the ongoing maintenance.
• There have been a few efforts (most recently by @copumpkin in Make a service abstraction layer NixOS/nixpkgs#26067 which seems to have stalled out) at a service abstraction layer which would vastly cut the amount of duplication necessary to run most services with launchd (among others), which I think informs a degree of understandable laziness about investing a lot of work in translations that would be rendered largely obsolete if a solid SAL manages to get merged.