I spotted this exchange on Matrix earlier and it reminded me of a suspicion I’ve had that one of the hurdles to learning Nix has to do with its weird relationship to fundamental concepts like what it means to “install” software:
Hi there. New to Nix here. I don’t get how to add extends to php, i installed php74 and php74Extensions.redis, but the redis extension doesn’t seem available.
Well, how did you install php74?
{ pkgs ? import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/a7ecde854aee5c4c7cd6177f54a99d2c1ff28a31.tar.gz") {} }: pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = [ pkgs.php74 pkgs.php74Extensions.redis # ... ]; }
I wonder if we’re missing some verbs (or–if they exist–a concept/terminology primer that collects them)?
(aside: the verbs might help clarify the core question in Rename 'nix shell' · Issue #4715 · NixOS/nix · GitHub)
Here are some links I could find where official and semi-official sources are ~overlapping with this question, (but I’m sure there are more…)