Flakes are becoming the *de facto* standard way of packaging Nix-based projects. However, flakes have some major problems due to the way Nix enforces hermetic evaluation: flake inputs (such as Git repositories) are copied to the Nix store, which is slow for large repositories, massively wastes disk space, and leads to confusing error messages. I will discuss recent flake changes that not only solve these problems but provide a bunch of other benefits, such as the ability to apply patches to inputs. I will also talk about future directions for flakes.
Speakers: Eelco Dolstra