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Paweł Chwała cepe

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@edolstra
edolstra / nix-flakes.md
Last active February 4, 2026 09:45

Nix Flake MVP

Goals

  • To provide Nix repositories with an easy and standard way to reference other Nix repositories.

  • To allow such references to be queried and updated automatically.

  • To provide a replacement for nix-channel, NIX_PATH and Hydra

@edolstra
edolstra / nix-lang.md
Last active October 23, 2025 06:51
Nix language changes

This document contains some ideas for additions to the Nix language.

Motivation

The Nix package manager, Nixpkgs and NixOS currently have several problems:

  • Poor discoverability of package options. Package functions have function arguments like enableFoo, but there is no way for the Nix UI to discover them, let alone to provide programmatic ways to
@edolstra
edolstra / nix-ui.md
Last active August 16, 2025 00:03
Nix UI

General notes

  • nix-channel and ~/.nix-defexpr are gone. We'll use $NIX_PATH (or user environment specific overrides configured via nix set-path) to look up packages. Since $NIX_PATH supports URLs nowadays, this removes the need for channels: you can just set $NIX_PATH to e.g. https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-15.09/nixexprs.tar.xz and stay up to date automatically.

  • By default, packages are selected by attribute name, rather than the name attribute. Thus nix install hello is basically equivalent to nix-env -iA hello. The attribute name is recorded in the user environment manifest and used in upgrades. Thus (at least by default) hello won't be upgraded to helloVariant.

    @vcunat suggested making this an arbitrary Nix expression rather than an attrpath, e.g. firefox.override { enableFoo = true; }. However, such an expression would not have a key in the user environment, unlike an attrpath. Better to require an explicit flag for this.

TBD: How to deal with search path clashes.

@cahna
cahna / ansible-aur-pkg-installer.md
Last active August 29, 2024 21:45
download, build, and install aur packages with ansible

About

When using ArchLinux, I typically prefer to use an AUR helper like pacaur or yaourt to automate away the process of installing a community package.

Ansible's pacman module is great, but it doesn't support AUR packages or pacman's -U flag. Installing AUR packages with Ansible seemed to be left as an exercise to the user, and since AUR helpers do not come with a fresh Arch install, I