Why are flakes still experimental?

[Nebucatnetzer]

@jtojnar

There are definitely people promoting Flakes without sufficiently emphasizing or even downplaying their experimental nature. As a result of this recklessness, there will be people using Flakes, who have not performed a proper cost-benefit analysis of the feature. This essentially forces Nix to one of the following options:

• freeze Flakes in their current state, unresolved issues that cannot be fixed without a BC break and all – ugly
• forever include an alternative code-path to support Flakes in their current state – lot of extra work
• break hundreds of repositories, some of which are no longer updated – goes against long-term reproducibility, one of the main selling points of Nix

I honestly don’t see a big problem here, maybe I’m missing something.

• Breaking change happens in software a lot. As long as it’s properly announced this is just normal in IT. And it’s hopefully not going to happen every 6 months.
• We’re talking about a feature that is marked experimental, it might happen that some home user doesn’t know the consequences but then the collateral damage won’t be that big (of course a tragedy to them, not to dismiss this). However a company building a product on top of Flakes hopefully has done their homework in this respect and knows what they are doing.
• The chance of third party repos working forever is quite optimistic. They would break anyway at some point. It’s not like all of nixpkgs stops working.

@jtojnar

Another option is waiting for the stabilization patiently. If you want pinning sources, niv is not going anywhere.

Niv is a third party project maintained by a single person.
IMO not really a much better foundation than just using Flakes which is integrated directly in Nix. At least that was my reasoning when I decided agains using Niv.