[jsomedon]

> When you inevitably find software that isn't in nix (or are packaging your own software), be prepared to take a quantum leap in complexity as you now need to fully understand the nix language and its concepts like derivations. This isn't necessarily hard but it is not documented well at all, and there are factions in nix at odds with each other (flakes vs. nix-env) which make learning it even more confusing.

Exactly this was why I am so hesitant to switch to nix. I tried to dig into the details of nix, language, derivation and whatnot, but documentations and community discussions are, in my experience pretty segregated that left me confused, and I eventually went back to arch.

[kaba0]

In 90% of the cases it is as easy as modifying the earlier version’s version and hash. I think learning nix from outside-in is perhaps easier - grep for something you are looking for, and as if it were a language and you are a small kid, imitate that.

Though I will give you that there is enough complexity in specifying which nixpkgs/flake gets built, where is it places, etc as is, especially with the `nix-\w+` vs `nix \w+` variants being slightly different, to the point that I always have to look it up in the man page/in my history whether I need -A and the like.