this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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I dunno, I don’t trust a guides still recommending flake-utils. You can make the same four loop in like 4 lines of Nix which is a smaller diff & doesn’t pollute your downstream consumers with a useless dependency. Flakes also don’t eliminate pointless builds, fileset or filtering the src can & the only tool with file tracking on by default is the Git VCS specifically (which also involves the intent to add flags which is the other side of annoying).
I sometimes write a flake with those 4 lines of Nix code, and it comes out just messy enough that tbh I'm happier adding an input to handle that. But I recently learned that the nixpkgs flake exports the
lib.*
helpers throughnixpkgs.lib
(as opposed tonixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}.lib
) so you can call helpers before specifying a system. Andnixpkgs.lib.genAttrs
is kinda close enough toflake-utils.lib.eachSystem
that it might make a better solution.Like where with flake-utils you would write,
Instead you can use
genAttrs
,It's more verbose, but it makes the structure of outputs more transparent.
Saving the dependency is pretty big since each flake you import will bring along its jungle of dependencies now in your downstream project. I can’t think of a use case where < 10 lines is worth a dependency—especially since as you noted,
lib
has the glue right there for you to put it all together.