nvfetcher VS devos-ext-lib

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.

I don't include the building nix expr for the sources because most of the time fetching the sources is good enough to derive a working nix build for them later. If you are interested, see also https://github.com/divnix/devos-ext-lib as I will also push some wip code for that.