I found the nix expression language somewhat confusing at first, but I was able to create simple packages after a couple days. You can find many examples in nixpkgs, e.g.

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...

Is that not AwesomeWM btw? There are some rough edges around package discovery (or holes in my knowledge).

If you install nix locally (just the package manager, not NixOS), I usually query like this:

    nix-env -qaP | grep awesome

Or I search through my local checkout of nixpkgs source.

I'll say that I'm finding nix (just using the package manager, not NixOS) to be a very nice way to manage some custom-compiled packages. I was able to upgrade nginx, for example, from 1.5 to 1.6 with all my plugins and compile flags in place with just a few small changes. This is surely possible through other means, but my previous method of manually downloading/compiling/saving configure flags in my $HOME/src was sloppy.

I considered something similar. No experience myself, but the starting points would be here:

http://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-1.7/manual/#chap-writing-n...

http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/

Looks alien to me (of course, it's new!), but not too scary. Might give it a spin in a VM at least.