I was sent here after asking for a meeting with the fixed-point/overlay grey-beards.

I'm 3-4 months down a design rabbit hole and I think it's about time to come talk to the folks who have shot themselves in the foot a few times before I injure myself lol.

I'll just include my original post:

If you are or know who are the wizards who wrote some of the Haskell newScope or related overlays - I would like to formally request counsel with the elders.
I've been working on some open source Nix+Node.js tooling for ~3 months, and I've accomplished quite a bit; but I'm at this stage where I'm going off the deep end with fixes/extends to basically create crawlers for package metadata. It's a blast; but I need to consult with people who have shot their feet a few times with this stuff because it can turn into a real time sink and I'm going to be out of toes soon. Haskell here is just an example because it is abundantly clear that those authors also went - fully off the deep end; but honestly if you've built any of the fixed-points or overlay systems in nixpkgs let me know.
My puzzle for today has basically been "when should I stack up raw overlays, and at which breakpoints in a pipeline do I compose and apply them". I sort arrived at the realization that a break between "gather pure metadata", optionally "gather impure metadata", "generate stage 1", and "get wild with a scoped callPackage style final round" are sensible; but deciding which of those are exposed for users is and experimenting more is getting nasty because I'm so deep down the path on certain patterns. I need a guide.
I went from "keep it simple stupid" a month ago to "absolutely every piece of data needs to be overridable" once I started collecting all of my functions/builders into an API and a part of me sort of knows "I have loaded a large caliber footgun that is going to go off soon" lol.

I was sent here after seeking the wisdom of "the fixed-point/overlay grey-beards".

I'm 3-4 months down a design rabbit hole and I think it's about time to come talk to the folks who have shot themselves in the foot a few times before I injure myself lol.

I'll just include my original post:

If you are or know who are the wizards who wrote some of the Haskell newScope or related overlays - I would like to formally request counsel with the elders.
I've been working on some open source Nix+Node.js tooling for ~3 months, and I've accomplished quite a bit; but I'm at this stage where I'm going off the deep end with fixes/extends to basically create crawlers for package metadata. It's a blast; but I need to consult with people who have shot their feet a few times with this stuff because it can turn into a real time sink and I'm going to be out of toes soon. Haskell here is just an example because it is abundantly clear that those authors also went - fully off the deep end; but honestly if you've built any of the fixed-points or overlay systems in nixpkgs let me know.
My puzzle for today has basically been "when should I stack up raw overlays, and at which breakpoints in a pipeline do I compose and apply them". I sort arrived at the realization that a break between "gather pure metadata", optionally "gather impure metadata", "generate stage 1", and "get wild with a scoped callPackage style final round" are sensible; but deciding which of those are exposed for users is and experimenting more is getting nasty because I'm so deep down the path on certain patterns. I need a guide.
I went from "keep it simple stupid" a month ago to "absolutely every piece of data needs to be overridable" once I started collecting all of my functions/builders into an API and a part of me sort of knows "I have loaded a large caliber footgun that is going to go off soon" lol.

I was sent here after seeking the wisdom of "the fixed-point/overlay grey-beards".

I'm 3-4 months down a design rabbit hole and I think it's about time to come talk to the folks who have shot themselves in the foot a few times before I injure myself. I'm not a JS user, honestly don't particularly like web stuff; but work asked me to "make Nix+Node tooling that the an intern could handle - you can open source it, ~6 month timeline". I'm close but I know myself and I've been playing with "fun" fixed points for like 2 weeks and if one of you don't save me from myself... 😅

I'll just include my original post.

If you are or know who are the wizards who wrote some of the Haskell newScope or related overlays - I would like to formally request counsel with the elders.
I've been working on some open source Nix+Node.js tooling for ~3 months, and I've accomplished quite a bit; but I'm at this stage where I'm going off the deep end with fixes/extends to basically create crawlers for package metadata. It's a blast; but I need to consult with people who have shot their feet a few times with this stuff because it can turn into a real time sink and I'm going to be out of toes soon. Haskell here is just an example because it is abundantly clear that those authors also went - fully off the deep end; but honestly if you've built any of the fixed-points or overlay systems in nixpkgs let me know.
My puzzle for today has basically been "when should I stack up raw overlays, and at which breakpoints in a pipeline do I compose and apply them". I sort arrived at the realization that a break between "gather pure metadata", optionally "gather impure metadata", "generate stage 1", and "get wild with a scoped callPackage style final round" are sensible; but deciding which of those are exposed for users is and experimenting more is getting nasty because I'm so deep down the path on certain patterns. I need a guide.
I went from "keep it simple stupid" a month ago to "absolutely every piece of data needs to be overridable" once I started collecting all of my functions/builders into an API and a part of me sort of knows "I have loaded a large caliber footgun that is going to go off soon" lol.