I meant the comment more conceptually, but yes syntactically your clarification is super helpful. Thanks!
First of all thank you everyone in this thread: it gave me the impetus (and examples to reference) to explore moving my config away from flakes. So far I’m quite happy with the result.
One aspect of flakes I missed during the refactoring was the consistency provided by the flake schema (e.g. NixOS modules are referenced using <flake>.nixosModules.default). I had to go exploring the repo and (unless the repo uses flake-compat) figure out how to use the modules/overlays in my config. Are there any efforts (other than flake-compat which is just kind of piggybacking on the flake schema) to standardize this kind of thing?
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I don’t have a repo to showcase, but I currently manage 4 machines from a single config, using npins and colmena. I had zero issues getting colmena working without flakes.
I have a similar setup for home-manager, by the way.
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This contains literally some of my oldest, worst Nix code as I don’t care to make my personal config something to “showcase”, but I manage 4 machines with my host/ directory & no flakes. I definitely should move to system.nix for the systems, but it’s pretty similar to what I have already. Currently I just run nixos-rebuild --sudo switch --no-flake --use-substitutes --file ~/nixcfg/host/(hostname) from fish to build my current system (by hostname).
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