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 painless. Let’s find out!
Short post on using mach-nix with niv. Background In previous posts, there was a discussion on a ground up approach to adding packages which aren’t on the core nixpkgs channels using GitHub or PyPi sources. However, this lacked a way to do so programmatically, and also a way to convert existing python projects. Python Dependency Management This time, instead of the more pedagogical approach of building packages from PyPi or GitHub, we will use overlays and the excellent mach-nix to speed up the process.