I was thinking about this the other day. The problem we are trying to solve here is almost purely on the maintenance side, not on the consumer’s side. From a maintenance perspective, breaking apart different domains can help maintainers iterate quicker, but from a consumer side having to then manage multiple (likely inter-dependent) flake inputs is not ideal. So what if we cheated a bit?
Instead, we break nixpkgs out into multiple domains which can be effectively managed by individual groups:
- Core
- Rust
- Extras
- …
And then we have a single flake which links them all back into one package set. That way users only actually have to deal with, say, github:auxcomputer/packages. You get the same consumer semantics as nixpkgs, but the maintenance side can be distributed. This may also make releases or specific augments easier due to this gating!