Drafts

The fifth tab is for software that is in no repository at all — not in nixpkgs, not in the catalogue, just a URL to a release or a source tree.

On Arch this is where you would reach for the AUR. There is no AUR here, and the honest equivalent is: somebody has to write a derivation. A draft is the machine’s first attempt at one.

Drafting

From a terminal:

nixarchy-pkg draft new https://example.com/thing-1.2.tar.gz

nix-init does the work, headless. It fetches the source, guesses the builder, guesses the dependencies and guesses the licence, and writes the result into your selection.

Its authors call the output a draft, and so does everything here. Those guesses are for a person to review. They are frequently close and they are not a package.

What “kept on failure” means

The draft is built once, immediately, and a build failure is reported as one.

The draft is kept anyway. A derivation that does not build yet is still a much better starting point than an empty file, and deleting it would throw away the part that was right along with the part that was wrong.

So a failed draft is a normal outcome, not an error to clear. Open it, fix the guess, build again.

Undrafting

RETURN on a draft row, once you have reviewed it and it builds. That promotes it out of draft state — you are saying the guesses have been checked by someone who can check them.

Nothing verifies that claim, because nothing can. It is a claim about attention.

When to use something else

If the software is in nixpkgs, use Packages. If it ships its own flake — a Neovim distribution, a shell framework, a module published on GitHub — a draft is the wrong tool; that is an input to declare rather than a derivation to write.