I don’t know about the word “pills.” The word “pills” makes me think of medicine; it makes me think of the idiom “a bitter pill to swallow;” it makes me think of sweaters that just came out of the wash. It does not make me think of… documentation, or learning. I assume that the title is meant to evoke “bite-sized” or something like that. I don’t know. It’s weird a weird choice, for a series.| ianthehenry.com
Nix 2.4 came out on November 1, 2021, and that’s sort of a big deal. It’s been more than two years since the last major Nix release, and there are some pretty important changes. Including some breaking changes, which is why I have waited so long to upgrade. Because I think that, in order to keep using Nix, I’m finally going to have to learn what “flakes” are, and do a bunch of other stuff just to restore the functionality that I was enjoying before. Or maybe not. It might be painles...| ianthehenry.com
Okay. In the last post I got sort of an introduction to flakes, and I even wrote a flake, but I didn’t learn how to… do anything with flakes. My flake provided an overlay, but I have no idea how to make my Nixpkgs actually use that overlay. I have no idea what “my Nixpkgs” even means anymore. My channel? My flake? Everything I’ve learned about Nix has been turned upside down. But presumably if we keep reading, these blog posts will explain how to actually put them to use.| ianthehenry.com
Okay. So: so far I’ve managed to write a flake, but I have no idea how to… use it. And I’ve managed to restore nix search to functionality, basically, by pinning my nixpkgs flake… but now I am searching something different than I will be installing by using nix-env, or by referencing in my shell.nix files, and this bothers me. Which means I’m going to try the new flake-powered profiles, and figure out what the flake-equivalent version of a shell.nix is, and the new way to write nix-...| ianthehenry.com