flakes tutorial

[mhwombat]

Perhaps this tutorial would be useful to others. Comments and criticisms are welcome.

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[mhwombat]

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[mhwombat]

recheck

[zupo]

I'm a complete flake n00b. This is a good read, but it needs to go further:

• I'd like to see a few full examples of stuff I can do with flakes. Complete hand-holding, just copy-paste in my terminal and it works. Then I can tweak and play with it to learn.
• I'm using a stable nixpkgs channel and flakes don't seem to be supported/enabled?

[mkroehnert]

@zupo the following blog post series by @Xe might also be interesting to you: https://christine.website/blog/series/nix-flakes

@mhwombat might also be a good link to add to the "Other Resources" section.

[mhwombat]

@mhwombat might also be a good link to add to the "Other Resources" section.

Done

[fricklerhandwerk]

Since we now have this twice, maybe add a section just for that and link to it in both cases? Or make it the same shape.

[fricklerhandwerk]

I don't understand this, what do the two samples mean?

[fricklerhandwerk]

This is really good and only needs polishing. Thank you!

A few general points:

We still need a section showing how to enable flakes. I updated the NixOS Wiki article - we could link to it or copy it verbatim.

While we haven't decided on this yet, I strongly suggest wrapping lines at sentence boundaries.

All of the things I commented on also hold true for the Wiki article. In addition, we have to reduce redundancy to avoid confusing people with overlapping (and worst: inconsistent) information. Therefore it would be awesome if you could take care of the article after this PR is merged, and update it in the same vein: link to this tutorial, remove redundant sections and additional resources. Possibly, if you want to take the time, add information from the external resources so we can eventually centralize all that knowledge.

[nixos-discourse]

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/usability-study-session-2/21400/1

[nixos-discourse]

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/usability-study-session-1/21398/1

[nixos-discourse]

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/usability-study-session-4/21422/1

[ghost]

I would greatly appreciate using this tutorial. Thanks for leading the charge into teaching flakes on nix.dev @mhwombat !

[zmitchell]

@fricklerhandwerk should we close this since we aren't documenting flakes?

[fricklerhandwerk]

I agree we should close this, but not only because we're not putting dedicated effort into documenting experimental features, but because we should approach this differently. In it's current form the diff to the reference documentation is minimal, and the value added here could be folded into the Nix manual.