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And now I’m trying to understand how devshells work in flakes and there’s pretty no doc

by baby 4y ago

Smaug123 4y ago
Ask your questions on discourse.nixos.org please - the documentation situation in Nix-land is generally exactly as you have noted, which means centralised question-asking in well-known locations is much much more helpful for Those Who Come After.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I say this with the utmost respect for those who work hard to answer questions on discourse, but I have found it singularly unhelpful. I strongly encourage the Nix community to embrace a mainstream Q&A platform like StackOverflow or GitHub Issues. Nix is “weird” enough for beginners already, the kind of janky interface and uneven moderation/quality on discourse is IMHO self-defeating for Nix.
  - pxc 4y ago
    Aside: I love the Discourse UI. It feels easy and thoroughly modern to me. What's janky about it, in your opinion?
    - baby 4y ago
      I also do not like it for different reasons (one of them is that they hijack ctrl+F)
      - pxc 4y ago
        Ah yeah, that behavior is annoying. At least if you hit it twice, you get the normal in-browser thing
  - baby 4y ago
    Agree. I feel the same way about OCaml, and I have forced myself to ask every questions I have on SO to build the list of answers there. Yet, people tend to answer on SO with “you should ask on the OCaml discourse”…
benreesman 4y ago
So a dev shell as consumed by a flake is typically just a derivation. And typically the most important thing in that derivation is ‘buildInputs’, which is just a list of ‘pkgs.thingIWant’. It’s not uncommon to hook other “phases” of the derivation, which are (oversimplified) just little shell scripts that run in some order (‘configurePhase’ before ‘installPhase’) and typically expressed using the nifty “” syntax. For example if Nix is like stuffing paths into a Makefile that you want to use in your dev shell, you might put that in installPhase. Protip: a Nix “package” (derivation) evaluated in a string context (foo = “${pkgs.gcc}”;) gives you a path to where the thing lives in /nix/store.

And now I’m trying to understand how devshells work in flakes and there’s pretty no doc

by baby 4y ago

And now I’m trying to understand how devshells work in flakes and there’s pretty no doc

Ask your questions on discourse.nixos.org please - the documentation situation in Nix-land is generally exactly as you have noted, which means centralised question-asking in well-known locations is much much more helpful for Those Who Come After.

benreesman 4y ago
I say this with the utmost respect for those who work hard to answer questions on discourse, but I have found it singularly unhelpful. I strongly encourage the Nix community to embrace a mainstream Q&A platform like StackOverflow or GitHub Issues. Nix is “weird” enough for beginners already, the kind of janky interface and uneven moderation/quality on discourse is IMHO self-defeating for Nix.
- pxc 4y ago
  Aside: I love the Discourse UI. It feels easy and thoroughly modern to me. What's janky about it, in your opinion?
  - baby 4y ago
    I also do not like it for different reasons (one of them is that they hijack ctrl+F)
    - pxc 4y ago
      Ah yeah, that behavior is annoying. At least if you hit it twice, you get the normal in-browser thing
- baby 4y ago
  Agree. I feel the same way about OCaml, and I have forced myself to ask every questions I have on SO to build the list of answers there. Yet, people tend to answer on SO with “you should ask on the OCaml discourse”…

benreesman 4y ago

So a dev shell as consumed by a flake is typically just a derivation. And typically the most important thing in that derivation is ‘buildInputs’, which is just a list of ‘pkgs.thingIWant’. It’s not uncommon to hook other “phases” of the derivation, which are (oversimplified) just little shell scripts that run in some order (‘configurePhase’ before ‘installPhase’) and typically expressed using the nifty “” syntax. For example if Nix is like stuffing paths into a Makefile that you want to use in your dev shell, you might put that in installPhase. Protip: a Nix “package” (derivation) evaluated in a string context (foo = “${pkgs.gcc}”;) gives you a path to where the thing lives in /nix/store.