Neovim's flake.nix moved to nix-community

Announcements
1

For the neovim users out there running neovim nightly via the flake.nix in the neovim repository, the flake is getting removed build: remove nix flakes by dundargoc · Pull Request #28863 · neovim/neovim · GitHub because it’s a maintainance burden unrelated to neovim.
It got moved to the nix-community repo feat: move neovim flake into the overlay itself by GaetanLepage · Pull Request #516 · nix-community/neovim-nightly-overlay · GitHub.

To update your flake.nix, replace inputs.neovim.url = "github:neovim/neovim?dir=contrib"; with inputs.neovim.url = "github:nix-community/neovim-nightly-overlay"; followed by a nix flake update neovim. Please bear with us as we update documentation and iron out the details during the move.

This gives us more latitude to enrich that flake with for instance nightly versions of neovim plugins.

16 Likes
2

Would it still be possible to get the latest stable release and not a nightly version? Something like "github:neovim/neovim?dir=contrib&ref=v0.10.0" or the main focus for this flake is the nightly build only? I guess the answer is no, but I want to be sure.

1 Like
3

You could use this input and change the follows clause accordingly and with the same (i. e.) consequences as before.

4

stable releases are part of nixpkgs so you could use a revision from: neovim | How to install with Nix or Devbox

We could create tags matching neovim ones but I will defer the decision to @gaetanlepage , who is shaping up to become the more active maintainer.

5

I understand, that’s what I’ll properly be doing, but in general, I had two (subjective) issues:

  • Nixpkgs is slightly slower getting updated, so I assumed the flake inside neovim repo will always be up to date with every release (This already won’t be the case anymore)
  • It seems that just by quickly scanning the package on nixpkgs, it has way more things (including patches) than the one in neovim, so I was sticking with the (official) package instead.

Overall, I have nothing against the change, I just wanted to understand if this would be an option.

6

Nixpkgs is slightly slower getting updated

I think nixpkgs is pretty fast, last release had a PR ready hours before the official release (even though it was botched a bit). For it to reach the cache can take longer but we are talking days.

It seems that just by quickly scanning the package on nixpkgs, it has way more things

That seems unlikely since the overlay is an override over the nixpkgs’ definition, e.g. it “updates” the nixpkgs neovim derivation.

1 Like