Congrats on the release! I love the focus on devex w/ typescript and autocomplete. That's probably one of my biggest pain points with Nix -- writing any non-trivial package always requires a ripgrep adventure through nixpkgs. Finding the right poorly documented and poorly discoverable derivation attributes is always such a chore.
What are your plans for cross-compilation or heavy package customization? One of nixpkgs coolest party tricks imo is that you can just change the stdenv and get a musl static binary or cross-compiled binary.
> What are your plans for cross-compilation or heavy package customization? One of nixpkgs coolest party tricks imo is that you can just change the stdenv and get a musl static binary or cross-compiled binary.
So in general, I don't think I'm going to have anything quite as powerful as Nix's overrides. But I'm hoping most of the use-cases for it will be covered by some simpler options:
- Since build definitions are functions, package authors can just take arguments for the things they want downstream users to be able to customize (e.g. `configure` flags, optional features and plugins, etc.)
- I haven't built it yet, but I think adding support for dependency overrides would be fairly easy, a la Cargo. Basically, you'd just fork or clone the package you want to tweak, make your tweaks, then set an "overrides" option to use it instead. I know that's not a super satisfying answer, but that should help cover a lot of use cases
- For toolchains specifically, I have an idea in mind for this as well (also not implemented at all). At a high level, the idea is that packages could use "dynamic bindings", which you can then override for downstream recipes (this would require some new runtime features in Brioche itself). The toolchain itself would effectively be a dynamic binding, letting you pick a different recipe (so you could swap glibc for musl, or gcc for clang, etc). Cross-compilation would also be built on this same feature
What are your plans for cross-compilation or heavy package customization? One of nixpkgs coolest party tricks imo is that you can just change the stdenv and get a musl static binary or cross-compiled binary.