I love Nix, but really am not a fan of the Nix package listing website. So, it is nice to see.
And I guess worth mentioning, but if you or anyone else is ever feeling a little less lazy than me and want to add more available metadata, some of my main gripes with the official site:
- No easy way to see dependencies without viewing the package derivation source code.
- No easy way to see "reverse" dependencies, period, as far as I am aware, short of basically grepping the entire nixpkgs repo, and even then you won't get a totally accurate answer.
This seems like it'd be awful to implement given I don't think you can realistically know this information without evaluating the entirety of `all-packages.nix`. But it is something I miss about stuff like Arch Linux's package website. And I think in some ways, it is even more important with stuff like Nix if you intend to override a particular package globally, since you may end up needing to rebuild god knows how many things as a result.
- No easy way to filter by package types, outside of the very small set of existing package sets (e.g., `vimPackages`, `mpvScripts, etc).
As an example, I'd really like to be able to see all font packages in the nixpkgs repo, but there's just no nice way to do this easily, unlike some other package managers. It would be another kind of awful feature to implement, since there is not currently any grouping that I am aware of.
You /can/ kind of grep the `all-packages.nix` file and get a rough idea by searching for what packages call `./data/fonts`, but actually parsing that is pretty rough, since not everything is as simple as `font-name = callPackage ./data/fonts/font-name {};`
A good example of that parsing annoyance would be the noto-fonts [1].
- No easy way to see build options. For example, packages like `mpv` or `ffmpeg_5` have loads of different feature flags, some of which are unexpectedly disabled or enabled.
Again, I think this would be not fun to implement. But it is something that I think Gentoo gets really right with the listing of 'use flags' on their package listings [2] (in fact, Gentoo's site kind of gets everything right; it feels like the gold standard to me). NetBSD/pkgsrc is another one of the few that does well, albeit with a less-fancy design [3].
[1]: <https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/96c0fdeb6accc9f76f1887...>
[2]: <https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/media-video/ffmpeg>
[3]: <https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/multimedia/...>