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Angle brackets in a Nix flake world (fzakaria.com)

submitted 1 month ago by ruffsl@programming.dev to c/nix@programming.dev

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Related discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859849

top 9 comments

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[–] degen@midwest.social 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Sooo right. Trying to learn nix, flakes, and home-manager in parallel without realizing extraSpecialArgs exists isn't fun.

Skill issue, maybe, but it's an ergonomic issue too!

copes

[–] Deebster@infosec.pub 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

extraSpecialArgs has real_escape_string energy

[–] degen@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago

really fits the snowflake vibe too

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

BTW, you shouldn't really need extraSpecialArgs in most cases; setting a _module.args config option should be enough.

[–] degen@midwest.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Gotta love that I've had my daily use machine running nixos for a couple years now and I don't even know what that is 😂

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

This is needed for Flake-based setups where you use some NixOS modules that aren't in Nixpkgs (home-manager being the most common use-case).

[–] InnerScientist@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Any sites you can link that explain the differences and how to use it?

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

There's a short explanation in this section: https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/#sec-option-types-submodule (look for specialArgs) and in this section: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#module-system-lib-evalModules-param-specialArgs. I don't know whether it's documented properly somewhere.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

I have experimented with something very similar in the past. I think the main issue is that it is quite confusing to read, being familiar with what the old <> syntax does.