Maybe a place for sharing nixos modules?

Something like NUR or something like that would be so awesome to be officially supported here!!! Like, custom modules for stuff like Sunshine that arent yet on nixpkgs (or future auxpkgs) could be included there, under something like github.com/auxolotl/XUR (auX User Repository) or something like that!

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Would this be necessary if we have flakes?

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It’d give people a central location to search for stuff and contribute unofficial packages to. :thinking:

Personally I found the NUR useful for setting up stuff like firefox extensions.

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That being said though, I wouldn’t really call it a “necessity” because with flakes you can just pull packages from peoples’ own repos instead of needing a centralized one.

Perhaps making an official recommended topic on GitHub for user-made aux flakes could make it easier to explore. Certain projects utilize this feature for their integrated plugin/skin downloader.
But ain’t sure if that’s relying too much on proprietary GitHub feature.

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I think this will bloom the scope of the aux project too early

So, hub.aux.computer! I think we can do better just by adding categories to it.

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This is your daily reminder that far from everyone is on flakes, giving “why do we need this when we have flakes?” a different tone than was likely intended :slight_smile:

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This is a really good point. We shouldn’t forget this. :sweat_smile:

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I do like @Axel’s point around discoverability, searchability, etc… Even if the modules, derivations, whatever are hosted elsewhere, like a contributor’s personal git, just having the extra visibility for what others in the community have done for a particular problem might be really helpful (and properly executed, maybe especially to newer aux users)

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Fair, though I was thinking that any flake-enabled thing would also be consumable using flake-compat. Is that not the case?

So if I’m getting this right we want a XUR, which is a AUR fast moving repo managed by the people providing packages and modules?

But my biggest question is why not upstream them to our nixpkgs fork?

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It absolutely is - just like the reverse is possible :slight_smile:

As I see it, the primary purpose of NUR & AUR is to more or less remove all barriers to contributing as well as all guarantees on maintenance. Merging either with their respective main distro repositories surely is just the annihilation of the former?

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Ah wait, now I follow. Re-reading OP the point would be official support. Yea then I’m 100% in your camp. Not seeing the point.

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Like without a doubt this makes sense if it wasn’t “official” support but under our name in the same way the AUR is under arch’s name. Then I could total get behind the idea. Of course there would need to be a warning that anything in said repo is not officially endorsed.

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If we’re going to do flakes, maybe a flake registry is instead what we need? And the registry has a flake that pulls in everything (they are inputs and that doesn’t allow evaluations so I’m not sure how that would be possible)

So something like nixpkgs search but with an overhaul of their flake registry?

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I absolutely think a flake solution is necessary as well. But I would like to point out that at this point a thread with a topic of modules has been completely subsumed by the flake elite :wink:

100% over-exaggeration for dramatic effect and I don’t necessarily think anything needs to change in the thread, but this seems a good stage to point out the issue, so that a stance and approach can be decided on while everything is early days. Without that this will surely just become default and anyone observing will assume that Aux is a flake-centric solution, before leaving.

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I was going to work on a search site for auxolotl soon™ :smile:

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