Data conversion

[waffle8946]

Third time it’s been discussed in the last month, I think we can look at the existing discussions

Incrementally salvaging stateVersion

system.stateVersion is widely acknowledged to be an imperfect thing. I’d like to propose incrementally augmenting it with a less imperfect thing. Problems I want to address: Users, new and old, perennially want to update system.stateVersion. We can tell them not to until we’re blue in the face, but there’s a certain kind of OCD computer toucher who simply cannot allow anything that looks like a date in their system config to be more than a year old; and the NixOS community has, I would wager,…

Unpopular opinion: Maybe `stateVersion` shouldn't exist at all

Hello there. First, I must say that I am just an ordinary NixOS user, not a module maintainer, and certainly not an experienced expert user, so my perspective may therefore be highly one-sided. And second, I must clarify that the title is not intended to disparage the hard work of the module maintainers. For the reasons behind this statement, please read on. Today, I spent several hours investigating exactly what purpose stateVersion serves. I even attempted to use hands-on experimentation to c…