[benreesman]

I’ve said this elsewhere in the thread and might do so again but it bears repeating: use flakes. At first they seem like this weird semi-supported thing, but eventually you realize that Nix is badly broken without them.

Flakes aren’t “experimental”. “Experimental” is what happens to your sanity without them.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Flakes aren’t “experimental”. “Experimental” is what happens to your sanity without them.

Okay, I like flakes, I use flakes, I enable flakes without much worry. But. They literally are an experimental feature, and they are still enabled by setting "experimental-features = nix-command flakes" in nix's config.

[benreesman]

I think I was maybe too casual with my language. Flakes are clearly marked experimental in the documentation. But they were a no-brainer a year ago, they’re always “a few months” from being official, they map directly onto users’ intuition around lock files, they enable principled composition of shit that doesn’t live in nixpkgs, the list goes on.

Outside of some (hypothetical to me) edge cases, not using them is masochism.

Flakes have a standard library (“flake-utils”) and and a pimped out version (“flake-utils-plus”).

Making it a weird gymnastics trick for a novice user to even access them is the kind of shit GHC devs say, “no, that’s too user-hostile even for us”.

Use flakes.