[Nix-dev] Documenting nixpkgs.config options

Herwig Hochleitner hhochleitner at gmail.com
Tue May 26 13:11:58 CEST 2015


Contrary to nixos *module* options, which are self-documenting at
http://nixos.org/nixos/options.html, there is no equivalent documentation
for options available in nixpkgs.config. This is unfortunate, because a
recent blog post (http://blog.lastlog.de/posts/useflags_in_nixos/) makes
the very good point of framing them as a gentoo - useflag equivalent.

Thus users wanting to customize packages, are left with the option of
diving into the source, or hunting for wiki pages about their target
package, e.g. https://nixos.org/wiki/Enable_Browser_Plugins

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/7446 is clearly relevant, however,
I'm primarily concerned with documentation right now, since I want users to
find the new wine options in the upcoming release.

Manually compiling a wiki page might work for now, but that will eventually
get outdated. Maintaining available flags in per-package metadata might be
better, but still risks running out of sync with careless commits.
Declaring a schema (a'la nixos-options), however, feels a little heavy
handed for nixpkgs.config.

Has there been work towards this? How should this be done?
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