Re: Overlays

[Ludovic Courtès]

Nikita Karetnikov <address@hidden> skribis:

>> So I think Guix nearly supports overlays, no?  :-)
>
> What do NixOS people mean by “overlay”?

Well, I don’t think that wiki page has much authority.  ;-)

“Overlay” is not a term that is used in NixOS circles.  My guess is that
the Ruby and Haskell overlays mentioned at
<http://nixos.org/wiki/Nix(OS)_related_repositories_and_work> are used
by a single person, and I’m not sure what they do.

> Is it a remote collection of recipes?  Does NixOS allow to use them
> without copying to the local storage (like ‘gnu/packages’)?
>
> I believe that the question was about these issues.

I’m not sure what the issues are.

In Guix, third parties could distribute their own Guile modules that
define packages.  Guix would need a way to nicely deal with them at the
command line, but otherwise it’s just Guile modules.

Ludo’.