I definitely agree that it can be overwhelming and somewhat unproductive to discuss all the issues with the current implementation all at once. But at some point we’ve got to distill these issues down into some form of RFC so, as @andir mentioned very eloquently, we can have a clear direction for the devs to move toward.
I myself have been very frustrated with my own person lack of C++ experience, and have tried and mostly failed to address some outstanding issues. The best I can hope for right now is to push the conversation forward and I’d be more than happy to help draft an RFC to bring everything together once we work out a clear direction for flakes.
It has been difficult to discern where best to try and address these issues since not all of the core Nix devs seem to frequent discourse, but I thought it might be a good place to start. The current situation of flakes being unstable for several years seems to have caused a lot of confusion, exhaustion and frustration for all parties, and I’d really love to see some concrete steps taken to finally move towards a merged release.
Even if the ultimate decision is simply to completely scrap flakes and move forward with a completely different solution, I’d like to see that codified as soon as possible.
After all, the longer we wait, the bigger that diff is going to grow…