> If instead of packing these separately, the home assistant nixpkg for home assistant simply downloaded all the required dependencies from PyPi, and verified them against a maintained list of checksums as part of the nixpkg (for reproducibility), then frenck probably would not object to that
From what I can tell the Home assistant core team doesn't not want to deal with any other installation variants than their own supported ones. Their user base consists of a lot of technical tinkering people (hobbyists, electricians, etc) but those who don't necessarily have Linux sysadmin skill's. So you could say they are skilled enough to get themselves in any of a hundred different configuration scenario's that would then need to be debugged by the HA developers for each support ticket. For a developer knowing the installation environment is at least sane is a great help.
That said, Home assistant does lend a lot of its growth to open source contributions, collaboration and being free software. If it was not as open in the beginning it might not have gathered enough attention to grow its current size. Cutting off developments in other directions like this to me feels against what FOSS stands for.
From what I can tell the Home assistant core team doesn't not want to deal with any other installation variants than their own supported ones. Their user base consists of a lot of technical tinkering people (hobbyists, electricians, etc) but those who don't necessarily have Linux sysadmin skill's. So you could say they are skilled enough to get themselves in any of a hundred different configuration scenario's that would then need to be debugged by the HA developers for each support ticket. For a developer knowing the installation environment is at least sane is a great help.
That said, Home assistant does lend a lot of its growth to open source contributions, collaboration and being free software. If it was not as open in the beginning it might not have gathered enough attention to grow its current size. Cutting off developments in other directions like this to me feels against what FOSS stands for.