@pinpox@chaos.social From a governance perspective, I'd say that it's highly likely that Flakes will indeed end up replacing various of the current mechanisms.

The model also generally makes sense - it addresses a bunch of real problems with how Nix works today, IMO, in a pretty effective manner design-wise. The RFC actually does a decent job of explaining the motivations: https://github.com/tweag/rfcs/blob/flakes/rfcs/0049-flakes.md

That having been said, the standardization process has been... suboptimal, to put it mildly. The whole RFC process (which is *supposed* to be used for this) was pretty much bypassed, the design having been pretty much settled upon before the RFC process even really started, and this has frustrated quite a few people.

The implementation process has also been a mess, and this could probably have been avoided by actually involving the community, instead of just dumping it into everybody's lap.

(Think "half the community is depending on an experimental-flagged feature and CLI tooling is getting updated in such a way that it sometimes just doesn't work with Flakes disabled anymore, etc. - on paper it's still unstable, but in practice it's largely become a requirement.)

Given the problematic standardization process, I'm not optimistic about community feedback really being considered prior to stabilization, and so I don't expect much to change.

We'll probably end up with a pretty decent system in the end, but it could have been done *so much* better if more work went into the governance side of things, and the community was actually involved in the design process.

TL;DR: It's *technically* not stable yet but for all practical purposes it pretty much already is.