One Nix flake to rule them all
The author introduces 'omniflake,' a tool designed to simplify the management of Nix flakes by aggregating thousands of inputs into a single source. This addresses the common frustration of dependency management in the Nix ecosystem.
Why it matters
It provides a technical solution to improve developer productivity and dependency handling within the Nix package management community.
Flakes are undoubtedly here to stay, and I’ve made my opinion on them well-known: they are “meh”.
Despite their ever-presence, adding a flake input continues to be a small annoyance that never goes away. It’s touted as a positive feature that flakes are federated but the reality is that I want the simplicity of a centralized flake. That was the beauty and power of nixpkgs .
The process is: you want disko , so you add a url , then a follows so it stops dragging in its own nixpkgs, and then you do it again for the next one. This has become a meme in the Nix community about how every flake drags in its own flake-utils .
So I wondered: could one flake carry every other flake, and you just reach in for whatever you need? 🤯
omniflake is thousands of Nix flakes behind one flake input.
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