Start shell with dependencies without creating a new flake file

[tobiasBora]

It is often the case that I want to quickly spawn a shell without creating 15 lines of flake.nix. Mach-nix was proposing a syntax like:

$ nix shell mach-nix#gen.python.package1.package2

which is (despite a huge time to download 500MB of who knows what) quite practical. Would it be possible to provide something along this line for dream2nix?

[DavHau]

Possible for sure. We just have to come up with an architecture for it. What's different in dream2nix is that dependencies are resolved impurely. That means we cannot put the resolver in a derivation like with mach-nix. We might be able to use something like impure-derivations to generate a lock file and then build the environment from it.

[tobiasBora]

I see, cool. Actually, being able to use the current nixpkgs might be interesting to avoid downloading too much new things.