[Nix-dev] Re: noob q: Best practice for test packages

[Yury G. Kudryashov]

Daniel J Beauregard wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am a noob to NixOS and have had some plesant experiences so far.  I am
> looking forward to creeating my first package.  In the Nixpkgs manual, it
> says to add a call to the new package in pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix.
> That sounds a bit intrusive - I don't want to mess around with
> /etc/nixos/nixpkgs on my system because it is updated by the nix-channel
> uitility and such.
> 
> I have been looking for a way to incorporate my own test packages from a
> separate directory and add it to ~/.nix-defexpr, but I don't know how to
> pass stdenv as an input without incorporating into the main
> all-packages.nix.  Is my goal achievable?  Am I missing something?
Look at /etc/nixos/nixpkgs/maintainers/scripts/nix-call-package by Michael 
Raskin.

Typical usage nix-call-package ./default.nix. There are some optional 
arguments (look at the source).