how should paths be used in the context of lazy trees

[roberth]

Nix + Nixpkgs seem to emphasize path values over relative path strings.

Discuss how paths should be used in the context of lazy trees.

@roberth is trying to prevent a catastrophic mistake of making the Nix language UX confusing due to increased prevalence of relative path strings in NixOS/nixpkgs#200718

OT: I tried to make a Project note, but it appeared as "draft". Are notes not a feature anymore?

[fricklerhandwerk]

@roberth could you instead make a pull request with a proposal that the team can discuss? Otherwise, the results of the discussion will evaporate in a closed issue.

Here's an example what that may look like: #6232

It can be a file somewhere in this repository, we can still clean it up when we find a better structure than /maintainers/stuff.md.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-12-02-nix-team-meeting-minutes-13/23731/1

[roberth]

In the prior to last meeting, Eelco has said that the Nix language isn't intended for path processing. So path values are meant to be used directly by users.

@infinisil is currently working on a few support functions that work well with path values. These functions are meant to cover use cases that aren't directly covered by the language itself, but rather supplement it. They are not meant to replace or abstract the path value, but rather supplement it, to make some advanced cases easier to implement. Examples are the path filtering library in Nixpkgs, or perhaps file discovery such as performed by dream2nix.

I think that, unless @infinisil has any questions, all that really remains is for the path documentation to be improved: #6530 (comment)