Adding nixified-ai and veloren to public flakes

[pbsds]

I came across these today:

• https://github.com/nixified-ai/flake - has many nice packages and even nixos modules
• https://github.com/veloren/veloren - has reproducible builds of the game Veloren. in nixpkgs there is only airshipper, which installs the game in userland and does not include the self-hosted server.

I however do not represent either project.

Do you agree to be added to the list of public flakes? @veloren @nixified-ai

[donovanglover]

Veloren looks cool, I haven't seen it before! Unfortunately I don't know much about the state of public flakes, and it seems like there's a lot of repositories with flakes but none of them are searchable with nixos-search.

5 years ago, it was stated that flakes would scale better than a monorepo. I think flakes are great since anyone can create something that can be easily used by anyone else (especially for larger flakes), but I usually don't discover such flakes unless I'm looking at the repository of software I'm already aware of.

That said, since nixified-ai and veloren are already public projects and FOSS, would it be better if nixos-search dynamically generated its flake list from existing public data?

[pbsds]

Something to discuss is wether consent from the authors of already public flakes is nessesary to add the flakes to the index, or if it should be more loose and free. If not one might run a GitHub search and discover lots of flakes to add in bulk. The argument for consent is that the flake author will start receiving more issues of people seeking support

[zhaofengli]

It could be done via a self-service submission process that adds a repo to a database, with no PRs or manual review to reduce friction. The submission process can check that the flake is well-formed and is intended to be discoverable via a marker file or a special output (solves the consent issue).

nixos-search can then periodically scrape repos in the database, updating the maintenance/popularity status and removing the ones that no longer exist or wish to be discoverable. I think this is less messy than a GitHub-wide scrape and supports alternative forges at the same time.

[pbsds]

Such a consent output, i.e. index-me = true, should be documented on the nixos wiki flake schema page, for maximum discoverability.

[nixos-discourse]

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

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/introducing-flakehub/32044/47

[max-privatevoid]

I'm one of the maintainers of nixified.ai. We'd be happy to be included in the list.

[MatthewCroughan]

Max and I both authored nixified.ai, and I consent to it, I'd be happy to be included. I would have said yes if I had known about it sooner, but was not pinged anywhere! :smiley_cat:

[pbsds]

Huh, group pings don't work then.

@AngelOnFira @LunarEclipse363, do you want veloren to get added to the list of public flakes?