Yae - Nix dependency manager in Go

vic · July 18, 2025, 7:07pm

Yae is a powerful yet minimal dependency manager intended for use with Nix, which functions similar to niv and npins.

fzakaria · July 20, 2025, 9:13pm

Might migrate to this rather than have everything be a flake input

waffle8946 · July 20, 2025, 11:10pm

I’m not 100% happy with npins but making a whole new project seems… misguided if we’re going to end up relearning the same lessons learnt by npins, with arguably no upsides.

For example:

github.com/Fuwn/yae

internal/yae/utilities.go

8720549ff


      
          	"strings"
          )
          
          func FetchSHA256(url string, unpack bool) (string, error) {
          	arguments := []string{"--type", "sha256", url}
          
          	if unpack {
          		arguments = append([]string{"--unpack"}, arguments...)
          	}
          
          	output, err := command("nix-prefetch-url", false, arguments...)
          
          	if err != nil {
          		return "", err
          	}
          
          	lines := strings.Split(output, "\n")
          
          	return strings.Trim(lines[len(lines)-2], "\n"), nil
          }

will cause double-fetching because of differences in name (see the analogous fix in fix the source name when calling `nix-prefetch-url` by fricklerhandwerk · Pull Request #132 · andir/npins · GitHub).

Also, am I correct in my understanding that this only provides a CLI to manage the lockfile and does not provide a nix abstraction to work with the lockfile?

Frontear · July 21, 2025, 12:42am

Out of curiosity, what does your application aim to accomplish that niv and/or npins isn’t able to? What sets it apart?