flake-parts VS nvfetcher

There are attempts like

https://flake.parts/

or

https://github.com/nix-community/flakelight

Their aim is to create an ecosystem of reusable Nix libraries. But it is tiny.

You can also just install flakes doing nix profile install . I wrote a tool to make it a bit easier, npt but it's completely optional. Once you install the packages with nix profile. Then in your repos you can use a flake with a devShell and run nix develop. Check https://flake.parts to write your flakes.

Definitely use flakes from the get-go. It's much more sane. Nix's documentation can be unorganized, but read through it when you can. Modules and other projects tend to have their own documentation as well, like Home Manager and flake-parts

That's not a typo, there OP is referring to https://github.com/hercules-ci/flake-parts

Pinning can be done without flakes, be it manually or with codegen (nvfetcher)

You should instead use the regular fetchGit, fetchFromGitHub etc. fetchers in fairly vanilla code, and yes, that often means dealing with checksums in some form. If you truly just want to yeet the latest revision into place no matter what it is, there are ways to automate that still, such as berberman/nvfetcher, or Mic92/nix-update.

Yes, however one downside is that, afaik, the inputs are downloaded eagerly, not lazily. Alternatively there are things like nix-update and nvfetcher.

The fetcher for this is https://github.com/berberman/nvfetcher. And if you want to simply map all the sources to extension packes, you could use http://github.com/divnix/devos-ext-lib and follow the readme. This is how I do it.

It has support for passthru so you can expose description, homepage and other meta attributes. You (currently) can't directly pass a attribute set to the nix source because nvfetcher is using string interpolation to generate it, so only string is allowed. There is a tracking issue for this: github.com/berberman/nvfetcher/issues/40. For now, you can use mapAttrs sources (sources = import ./_sources/generated.nix { inherit (final) fetchurl fetchgit fetchFromGitHub; }) to generate the appropriate meta from passthru.