Newbie question: what is the meaning of two dots in an attribute name?

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1

I search for a home-manager setup for kmail.
In list I find expressions like accounts.email.accounts..address

I assume that the two dots have significance. What do they indicate? - I could not find any indication.

Thanks for help!

ps. is there anywhere an example how to set up Kmail?

2

Its just a slightly broken way to show it expects an attribute set of named accounts, so something like:

accounts.email.accounts.gmail.address

Or more complete example

{...}:
{
  accounts.email.accounts = {
    gmail = {
      address = "me@gmail.com";
    };
  };
}

As to how this actually woks, no idea I don’t use home manager much. Hopefully what I do know helps.

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3

@MagicRB is right. I’ll just add that this looks like a bug specific to the website you linked. The official Home Manager manual lists these options as e.g. accounts.email.accounts.<name>.address, which indicates that accounts.email.accounts is an attribute set a little bit clearer.

3 Likes
4

Thank you for clarification. Bad hacks like this make NixOS hard to start with.