Home Manager Symlinking Directories

Help
1

I am in the process of moving my config to home manager and am facing an issue when symlinking directories. For example, I want to link config/dracula/lxqt which contains all lxqt configurations.

  xdg = {
    enable = true;
    configFile."lxqt" = {
      source = ./config/dracula/lxqt;
      recursive = true;
    };
  };

The above code does not work, when I cd, it says the file or directory does not exist. However, adding source = config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink ./config/dracula/lxqt; works in this particular case (and ideal because lxappearance changes the source files) but for other applications like emacs or vim, I would like to have declarative dotfiles. What is the workaround for this?

2

Is something created at all? Is the source perhaps an empty folder? Is something created if you do recursive = false?

3

This seems to work after a reboot, but all the files are now read only with source = config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink ./config/dracula/lxqt; and recurive = true/false

dr-xr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Jan  1  1970 .
dr-xr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 Jan  1  1970 ..
-r--r--r-- 28 root root  379 Jan  1  1970 lxqt.conf
-r--r--r-- 28 root root   76 Jan  1  1970 lxqt-config-appearance.conf
-r--r--r-- 28 root root   30 Jan  1  1970 lxqt-config.conf
-r--r--r-- 28 root root   76 Jan  1  1970 session.conf

I want these writable but they appear to belong to root

4

I changed it to link only a single file

  xdg.configFile."lxqt/lxqt.conf" = {
    source = config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink ./config/dracula/lxqt/lxqt.conf;
  };

The file appears to still be read only and connected to nix store
lrwxrwxrwx 1 joe users 85 Jul 17 21:55 lxqt.conf -> /nix/store/xsn5nsrxmb733107dmms4hdafrlavvh4-home-manager-files/.config/lxqt/lxqt.conf

Edit: Looks like an issue in how flakes work https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/pull/1455#issuecomment-681041818