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Major differences from Nixpkgs

Although there is desire to keep as aligned with Nixpkgs as possible, Ekapkgs isn't obligated to retain poor UX paradigms either. In that vein, the following changes differ significantly from whath one would expct with Nixpkgs.

Evaluation behavior

  • ~/.config/nix is no longer respected for config or overlays
  • config.gitConfig and config.gitConfigFile were removed
    • Globally altering git behavior should be done at the machine level

Package paradigms

  • setupHooks for build managers are now explicit and opt-in.
    • E.g. meson.configurePhaseHook now needs to be specified.
  • doCheck now defaults to false across the package set.
    • Test suites are not executed as part of the main build by default.
    • This keeps the critical build path lean and avoids rebuilding the world when only a test-related input changes.
    • To run a package's tests, override with doCheck = true or evaluate the dedicated test derivation (e.g. pkg.passthru.tests.*).
  • buildPythonPackage exposes a testPaths attribute for deferring test execution into a separate derivation.
    • testPaths is a list of files and/or directories (relative to the source root) that comprise the package's test suite. The typical case is testPaths = [ "tests" ];, but the list may include sibling helper modules, fixture data, root-level test scripts, or documentation files referenced by the test suite (e.g. testPaths = [ "tests" "smartypants" "README.rst" ];).
    • When testPaths is non-empty, an additional test_src output is produced containing just the listed paths (plus any root-level conftest.py, pytest.ini, setup.cfg, pyproject.toml, or tox.ini), and a passthru.tests.python derivation is auto-generated that runs the test suite against the installed package using the configured nativeCheckInputs / checkInputs.
    • The generated test derivation skips configurePhase, buildPhase, and installPhase. It runs only the checkPhase / installCheckPhase (plus any check hooks like pytestCheckHook that append to preDistPhases), against the installed package which is provided as a nativeBuildInputs entry. This avoids rebuilding the package just to run its tests.
    • This decouples test execution from the main build, allowing test failures or test-only dependency churn to avoid invalidating downstream consumers.