I'm not convinced flake inputs should exist

[SergeK]

@L-as

want to depend on some system package called x, but there’s a Haskell package with the same name, so you can’t depend on it

IMO this is because makeScopeXXXXXX and callPackage functions aren’t powerful enough:

Frustrations about splicing

Yes I think it’s not splicing per se that is cursed, it’s the way we implement scopes and callPackage, which hinders both cross-compilation and situations like “there’s foobar in python3Packages but I need to ask for foobar from the top-level pkgs”. Then there’s also the general issue of expressing more complex graphs than makeScope newScope chains when working out of tree I wish I could do a more explicit/fine-grained dependency injection, sort of like # package.nix { dependencies.wayland-s…

EDIT: Where I was going with the linked snippet is that instead of feeding just a lambda into callPackage, we could say a “recipe” is a structure with a lambda and the metadata explaining how to fill in the lambda’s arguments. In particular, we could try and express the solution to your problem as “take X from the scope two levels up”

It is notable that we’re not discussing flakes anymore, it likely never was about flakes