My Nix-related goals for the next week or so are:

1. Finish setting up a homelab Mac Mini using nix-darwin, NixOS VMs, etc.
2. Use it for nixpkgs-review and learn more about doing CI with Nix
3. Create a first cut at a Bouncy Castle build using a Nix flake
4. Review a few PRs
5. Create some update PRs for zulu, graalvm-ce, and maybe jextract

Well the Nix artifact would essentially be the output of a Gradle installDist task, with something like this:

distributions {
    main {
        contents {
            project.subprojects.each { sub ->
                into(sub.name) {
                    from sub.jar
                    from sub.sourcesJar
                    from sub.javadocJar
                    from sub.generatePomFileForJarPublication
                    from sub.generateMetadataFileForJarPublication
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

I doubt it would be easier to publish from Nix

I just finished telling you that I'm a Matrix-using, Signal-using, Scheme-experimenting, Java 8 developer, former COBOL programmer, who enjoys writing Nix derivations. Do you think I'm looking for easy? 🤣

I like the idea of being able to have a 1-1 mapping between what is on Maven Central and a Nix derivation and I feel that (might) be worth the extra effort.

I'm not a fan of jreleaser due to its dependency footprint.

I noticed that, too and share your concern.

the AQAVit test suite seems to be very difficult to run offline though

(and frankly it's not 100% guaranteed that AQAVit would help us, but could help discover any potential Nix-specific bugs in full source JDK build chains)