Will Flakes enable using repos like cargo and npm?

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1

I saw the RFC for Flakes but didn’t yet wade through it. As I understand it, it allows composing NixPkgs from multiple sources.

I wonder if this will also allow some translation layer that can consume the huge package repositories that most programming languages have and converting them on-the-fly to Nix?

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2

I have the same question :thinking:

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Some packages on npm, crates.io, PyPI, etc. require certain libraries outside their own ecosystem, that are not explicitly declared, say libc. Those packages are often found at the root of the dependency tree, so this will affect a lot of the packages, even if it is a minority of packages. So some manual maintenance effort is definitely still required to make this work.