| 9 Mar 2025 |
 elikoga | But if you want to add to add the attribute "lastModified" to tarball inputs then it's a breaking change for some and you should add backwards compatibility since It's not deserving of being a format-bump
Just as has already happened in github:nixos/nix as far as I can see | 14:54:57 |
 emily | ok. I think you underestimate the burden and headaches of supporting e.g. the exact current weird/busted fetchTree semantics for all of eternity (indeed there have been recent bugs where the fixes would have been considered potentially unacceptable compatibility breaks for stable Nix already iirc). flakes are not nearly as simple under the hood as they appear on the surface | 14:55:50 |
| elikoga | Links would be lovely | 14:56:30 |
| emily | I don't think it's a conspiracy that almost everyone who works on a Nix-derived codebase thinks that stabilizing flakes is a very complicated process | 14:56:35 |
| emily | and I do use flakes. but anyway, you can consider me an agitator deliberately misrepresenting the technical state if you wish | 14:57:03 |
| emily | https://github.com/nix-community/fetchTree-spec didn't get off the ground yet but involved people from three separate Nix implementations and there's some documentation of very weird behaviour in the issue tracker. most of this stuff is just scattered across a dozen issue reports and PRs though. | 14:59:58 |
| emily | also roberth already gave a good example: | 15:00:17 |
| emily | "As a brief example, we’ve had a case recently where users were using flake inputs to fetch submodules. This is completely unnecessary since 2.26, and it only worked for them because their working directory happened to coincide with the flake root. Sensitivity to the working directory instead of base directory is bug, so here you see an interaction between the two kinds of stability that we discussed.
If we had committed to the 2.25 behavior of flakes by blessing it as stable, we would have to implement a completely unnecessary feature which would even require some architectural changes, removing the separation between fetchTree and the base directory concept, forever making call-flake.nix and the native code that interacts with it more complicated." | 15:00:25 |
| emily | flakes have reliably had more breaking changes than any other part of the language really | 15:01:14 |
| emily | lots of weird stuff around subflakes too | 15:01:30 |
 WeetHet | In reply to @elikoga:matrix.org
Nothing wrong with nix flakes channel being "nix-programming-general" (except for off/on-topic) it's just that agitators don't seem to acknowledge that fact Tbf one could argue it became this way due to widespread propaganda of flakes as an entry point into the nix world which they imho shouldn't be | 15:17:50 |
| elikoga | What the fuck else should I be using to lock my lockfile? npins? Pinning by hand? | 15:21:01 |
| elikoga | Should I set NIX_PATH myself like a Victorian era peasant? | 15:21:37 |
| elikoga | Should I write my own script to do the fetching? | 15:21:51 |
