[moojd]

Thanks Graham! Glad to see some attempts at improving the dx of sharing expressions with flakes instead of just derivations. I've seen libraries and tools handle this in a ton of different ways. Do you think there will ever be a standardization of the 'lib' output?

[grhmc]

I hope there will be, but I'm not really sure. I think the future of Nix is in smaller, focused flakes being shared and exchanged. People dunk on projects like Rust and Node for having infinity dependencies, but it is that way because those ecosystems have rich library ecosystems that are worth using. I see the same thing happening in Nix.

[clhodapp]

Regularization of more Flake outputs into schemas sounds compelling. E.g. thanks to this great work on flake schemas, do the definitions of outputs related to NixOS modules, NixOS configs, and nixpkgs overlays even need to be pre-baked into Nix?

In terms of this decomposition effort, one additional thing that would be really nice to see would be turning flake URL schemes & updaters extensible. One could imagine some kind of a dictionary that maps from schemes to derivations that contain the code needed to get the primitive URL for the "latest" version of the flake when an update is called for.