I may be able to help here after actually recently converting a work project over to use a recent iteration of std
. I think the first thing to note is that this is still very much a WIP, but the plan is to eventually reach a 1.0 and version the schema accordingly from there. One thing we are still lacking is a fully functional cli interface, which would essentially replicate the functionality of the tui in non-interactive settings such as CI.
The problem being solved here is largely one of organization. At IOG for example we have tons of projects making use of Nix, but the status quo has become one where each individual project more and more began to deviate to it’s own structure, to the point where those of us on the SRE team could become very confused when switching from project to project.
Much better to have a standard (hence the name) project structure where things like discoverability and documentation become trivial, and switching from project to project is less burdensome. Also, having documentation directly available in the tui is a good UX for newcomers who just want to know what they can do with the project.
Already I am able to do things like build and upload OCI images of some of our deployment packages to our private registry to be deployed on cluster, or build a job description for a Nomad cluster and run it.
Soon we will have integration with our experimental in-house CI platform and I can trivially replicate CI runs locally. Actually, I can already replicate CI runs locally even if just using more “traditional” CI systems like GitHub actions.
I percieve another possible goal of the project as potentially putting pressure on upstream Nix itself to hopefully improve UX further for all of us.
Perhaps as a one off structure for small projects, it isn’t horribly useful, but if you’ve got to manage several projects at once, it can become quite invaluable to have a sane and well organized structure. And for onboarding newbies who may not even know much about Nix at all, it can also be useful, at least that’s the hope. Like I said, still in early stages, but already useful for my sanity personally.