Change request: about .envrc

[hellwolf]

.envrc is used by direnv, a tool to allow you to have a distinct development environment for each directory.

Since this project uses nix flake, conveniently, nix-direnv is an extension to direnv. This allows a simple use flake one liner for setting up a reproduciable development environment to any contributor.

Note that a developer might also want to customize their own .envrc for the project, e.g. I might want to override my nixpkgs inputs in order to reduce disk space usage use flake . --override-input nixpkgs /var/lib/nixpkgs/hellwolf-unstable. Further more additional shell environment might also be added here as the developer wishes.

However as it stands, hevm project commits a .envrc to the repository, and uses an different form of use_flake which according to my experience and maybe somewhere in the docs creating a cluster of nix gcroots.

I am proposing simply removing .envrc from the repo, add it to the .gitignore list, and let the developer choose their own way of doing it. An .envrc.example may still be supplied for reference purpose.

[d-xo]

hm, this would be pretty annoying for me, I use worktrees a lot for hevm, and tend to have 10s of repos lying around my filesystem at any time. I would not want to have to recreate my .envrc every time I create a new worktree. Perhaps we could make it something like the following, and you could set HEVM_NIX_DIRENV_ARGS in your shell profile?

use flake . ${HEVM_NIX_DIRENV_ARGS}

@arcz are you using direnv with hevm? do you have any thoughts here?

[hellwolf]

Perhaps we could make it something like the following, and you could set HEVM_NIX_DIRENV_ARGS in your shell profile?

Unfortunately, not in this case, since I'd use use flake not use_flake, for some reason I don't fully know, they are different. And it's a rather an ad-hoc fix that doesn't address the fundamental reason.

Though I hear you about the worktree workflow. I am not a worktree user myself, I don't have anything to suggest for now.

Happy to hear from others' thoughts.

[arcz]

I don't use anything extra, when I work on hevm I just do nix develop

[hellwolf]

:) Yea, I could always not allow the default .envrc, and run the command manually indeed.

Fwiw, this is the relevant discussion happening in the direnv: direnv/direnv#556. If we can't settle to anything, I will watch the upstream thread and come back with a new suggestion.