Often when creating flakes for new Nix tools or building blocks, I find myself wanting various basic functions for working with lists, strings, and so on.
As a result, I add the entirety of nixpkgs as a flake input just so I can access the handy lib attrs, despite not needing any other pkgs or nixos modules. nixpkgs feels like quite a lot of source to pull down just for a few primitive functions.
Has there been much discussion around having lib in its own repo, and then using that repo within nixpkgs? I can imagine it’s easier for nixpkgs maintainers to iterate on lib while it’s in the same repo, but it seems this may inevitably incentivize flake users to recreate a lot of the same functionality elsewhere?
Alternatively, perhaps there’s some way the nixpkgs CI can “publish” lib in some way that it’s accessible standalone
In the case that there’s not enough enthusiasm for separating lib from nixpkgs, perhaps there’s interest from flake users in having a kind of lib (or core/std/base) under nixos or nix-community orgs for this purpose?
I came across divnix/std, but it looks like it’s more focused on devops than basic operations on nix primitives. chessai/nix-std looks closer to what I imagine, though looks fairly heavily haskell inspired (e.g. monoid, monad, applicative, etc) which I think is laudable but perhaps less useful in Nix where there’s no type-system to enforce the invariants of those abstractions.
If there was interest for this, I guess it would be easiest to start with a straight copy of nixpkgs/lib, as it’s at least a base most already agree upon (perhaps minus the nixpkgs-specific stuff (e.g. maintainers)?
