Questions about doCheck and checkInputs

[Solene]

In the documentation, I understand doCheck default value is false.

However, by looking at doCheck in nixpkgs, it seems it’s defined to true by default and it’s often used to turn it off

I’m currently looking at this because fish plugin fzf-fish https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/6a9da90be349a18e6cd3a121bd0d8aa03965e036/pkgs/shells/fish/plugins/fzf-fish.nix#L14 has fd in checkInputs, but when I use this plugin the shell is complaining about fd missing.

The documentation says checkInputs is included in nativeBuildInputs when doCheck is set., which is not explicitly enabled in the package definition.

[delroth]

@Solene

However, by looking at doCheck in nixpkgs, it seems it’s defined to true by default and it’s often used to turn it off

Some language specific derivations (e.g. Python) set doCheck to true by default. I suspect that’s why you’re seeing some derivations set it to false even though it’s the “global” default, they’re overriding the what was set by e.g. buildPythonPackage.