, Main track (Gym)
Flakes are becoming the de facto standard way of packaging Nix-based
projects. However, flakes have some major problems due to the way Nix
enforces hermetic evaluation: flake inputs (such as Git repositories)
are copied to the Nix store, which is slow for large repositories,
massively wastes disk space, and leads to confusing error messages. I
will discuss recent flake changes that not only solve these problems
but provide a bunch of other benefits, such as the ability to apply
patches to inputs. I will also talk about future directions for
flakes.
Mid-level
Eelco Dolstra started the Nix project as a PhD student at Utrecht University. He currently works at Determinate Systems.