One thing adding to Nixpkgs's current development workflow is not sustainable, is the discoverability of out-of-tree packages. Without that, federated system stays in the realm of the impractical.
I’m making this post because I want to do something about it, and I’ve been thinking about this problem since I first posted about the version-discoverability issue.
I think we agree Flakes are an the opportunity to solve the discoverability problem in a forward-compatible way. But to my knowledge, description
is the only non-functional piece of data in a nix-flake so unless it contains a JSON/YAML/TOML string, which is not going to hold anywhere near enough data for a search system to index and deliver to the average user.
So, before I work on an RFC, have there been any prior discussion on storing static indexable information in flakes?
I’m aware of nix flake metadata
, but I mean data from the flake.nix
that can be parsed without the need for nix evaluation. This would be information such as a package name, keywords, descriptions, homepage links, characteristics, etc; anything a discovery system would want know without evaluating the entire nixpkg tree.