Experimental should mean unstable, there are such good opportunities to make breaking changes that would make flakes better. As it is, flakes are stalled without even being released…
I also think it’s a shame that the better CLI is locked behind flakes.
It would be nice to bring those improvements to everyone.
Flakes are not the only way to handle lockfiles, nor did they need to be.
As far as I’m concerned, flakes are just a terrible lockfile spec. I see your company wants to monopolise the actual benefits of lockfiles (version bounds) but this should’ve been part of flakes itself, if flakes are what people want.
You also forgot to mention in your article that, to date:
- The only way to handle unfree packages in flakes is with an overlay
- There’s no (pure) way to tell the nix3 CLI to go ahead and build on an unsupported system
- Flake input url syntax is broken
- There is still no concept of development-only inputs
- Can’t reject flake config all at once, I have to manually reject each line of config, one by one…
- The global registry exists and is enabled by default (although easily disabled, it encourages terrible code)
PS Isn’t Eelco part of DetSys? He’s collaborating with himself?