Dendrix import-trees

Our last section ended with the following mission statement:

This is the goal of the Dendrix project: To allow people share dendritic configurations and socially enhance their capabilities.

As a first step into this goal, Dendrix discovers what aspects and which nix configuration classes are provided by the dendritic community repository sources.

The sidebar on the left shows a filtering UI that serves three purposes:

• Document which aspects/classes are found on each repo and their locations.
• Visibility on what names are used by the community for defining aspects/classes.
• Allow people to re-use existing aspects by providing import-trees to them.

Using Community import-trees

For each community repository, Dendrix exposes a top-level import-tree that provides all files in the repo shared paths. And for each discovered aspect in the repo, Dendrix defines another import-tree inside repo attribute.

# your ./modules/something.nix
{inputs, ...}:
{
  imports = [
    inputs.dendrix.some-repo # ALL shared files in a repository. intended to be used WITH `.filter`.
    inputs.dendrix.some-repo.some-aspect # Files that define flake.modules.<class>.some-aspect
  ];
}

An example of a repo's import-tree is dendrix.vic-vix. It references all files shared by vic's modules/community directory, except for those having the private infix (see conventions).

An example of an repo's aspect import-tree is dendrix.vic-vix.macos-keys that provides MacOS like keys on Linux using keyd.

Community Participation.

Sharing re-usable parts of your Dendritic configs.

You are free to send a PR adding/removing your dendritic repo into dev/npins/sources.json.

If you have an uncommon directory layout, or you want to share custom import-trees, you can specify specific community paths. (see all options)

As an example in the previous link, vic has a modules/community subdir, indicating that everything outside of it might not be ready for re-use by other people. perhaps because it depends on some hardware or host-specifc or user-specific settings.

Organizing with other people around aspects.

The better we organize and name our files around aspects, the better it will be to discover their intent and re-usability.

It is our hope that using the UI at the left, we can discover how are community members naming our aspects or organizing our files, and we can participate in community discussions around aspect's naming conventions.