In reply to @trofi:matrix.org
I wonder what it would look like if every single nixpkgs package had their own unique helper to apply patches and change depends :)

In reply to @roberthensing:matrix.org
overriding arbitrary internals would be frowned upon, because that is not a testable or maintainable interface. Instead, users would contribute functions, tests, and documentation to support their use cases instead of trying to work around the unpredictable internal changes in packages. It'd be glorious

i kinda disagree with this portrayal of the current state of things, there was a naturally developed API for overriding packages which is explained in Nix pills and stuff, overrideAttrs has some standard expectations: you can override patches, etc, etc.

this all solidified quite well without many efforts thanks to automatic injection of these attributes and pushing packagers to use a set of mostly standard APIs, of course, some packagers went their own way, e.g. python3Packages and the suffering caused by that is reported constantly in the well known issue, I don't think a day passed with people saying "I'm glad that python3Packages has its own API for override and its own contract" that no one knows

having an API to inject your own override / overrideAttrs is 95 % of the time not needed, most packages have absolutely boring needs