Nix packages

• the most important component managed with Nix package manager are Nix derivations

• derivations are basically recipes how the Nix build daemon compiles the package

• most derivations are verbose but we can easily create one with nixpkgs

• for certain setups such as common conventions for certain programming languages like Rust and Go, nixpkgs has environments created for those; different versions may have changes so be sure to go into the appropriate documentation and create packages for a specific channel; this is significantly easier with Nix flakes

Ecosystems

• while derivations can be interacted with the builtin function builtins.derivation, it isn't really recommended since it is very verbose; instead, you use stdenv.mkDerivation from nixpkgs

• nixpkgs is the official repository of NixOS containing the standard library extending the Nix language, the largest repository of packages (counting up to 80,000 as of 2021-12-12), and various NixOS modules used to build the system itself

• nixpkgs contains stdenv which is a derivation meant to be a base for other packages

  • stdenv contains base packages that virtually all packages have (inside nixpkgs)

• stdenv.mkDerivation is a convenient way of creating derivations; however, it is very abstract and a lot of events happening around it

  • this is a function that accepts a large attribute set

  • it will map its arguments corresponding to a parameter in the final derivation made with stdenv (which is a shell script)

  • attributes are usually just variables; this is especially prevelant if

  • packages can also set setup hooks (i.e., setupHook) that are essentially shell scripts to be added in the final derivation

    • example: cmake, glib, and most of the build systems at nixpkgs