Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I think I've told this story here before, but I might as well do it again.

In the shopping center of the town where I live, Rosmalen, we have two branches of Jumbo, a supermarket chain. The two branches aren't *quite* within viewing distance of each other, but only really because the view is blocked by a building inbetween.

Why? Well, according to local legend, that story starts with a newly-to-be-built neighbourhood...

De Groote Wielen is a major expansion of Rosmalen; it adds about half the town's size again, to the north of the existing urban area. It's a mixed development, but like the rest of Rosmalen, pretty Dutch-suburban in its nature; Rosmalen is glued to the side of Den Bosch, a bigger city, and so mostly functions as a commuter town.

De Groote Wielen has been under construction for a long time now; I believe more than 10 years. Every once in a while, a new zone gets completed and people move in. Even though the project is not done yet, it is already a living neighbourhood.

Now of course, a neighbourhood needs shops! So the plan was to build a shopping center for De Groote Wielen. Jumbo acquired a promise from the city that they would have the primary supermarket location in that newly-built shopping center.

But these plans got delayed, and residents complained about the lack of a supermarket for so long, so a stopgap plan was set up to build a temporary shopping center out of portable building units. Jumbo couldn't immediately construct a functioning temporary supermarket, so Albert Heijn, a competing supermarket chain, offered to do it instead. The city agreed.

But then things got murky. Albert Heijn started making noises about not wanting to give up their branch, and saying that now that they were already serving the community, they should have first right to the primary supermarket location in the new shopping center - the spot that had been promised to Jumbo!

Jumbo was not amused. So what'd they do? Well, the primary shopping center of Rosmalen was getting partly renovated, and a new supermarket location was being constructed as a part of that. Jumbo already had a branch in the old part, but they expressed their interest in establishing a branch in the new part too.

I guess people assumed they would move their existing branch to the new location. But that's not what happened. Instead, they kept operating both branches concurrently, and there is no plan to get rid of either of them; the one in the old part was recently renovated too!

So the rumours are that Jumbo is deliberately occupying both supermarket locations in the central shopping center as revenge on Albert Heijn for their backstabbery in De Groote Wielen; because AH had wanted to establish a presence in the central shopping center of Rosmalen too, but now they can't, because there are no free locations - Jumbo is occupying both of them!

Now, how much of this story is exactly true, I don't know; there's no formal documentation of all this anywhere. But this is the story that I've now heard from multiple folks around here... and it's difficult to find a different explanation for the two branches!

You know, this whole thing wouldn't have been an issue at all if they'd simply given it a different extension, to make it visually clear that it only permits a restricted subset of Nix.

But apparently nothing was learned from the existing mountain of footguns.

I am so incredibly tired of this shit.

I am so incredibly tired of this shit.

So I just learned that apparently flake.nix files aren't actually proper Nix files, despite having a .nix extension, and that they introduce additional syntactic restrictions.

Not type checks on the evaluation result - *syntactic* restrictions. A flake.nix that consists solely of an import of a valid flake under another filename, would be invalid, even though it would be identical value-wise to the valid flake itself.

Great. Because what Nix sorely needed was definitely more hidden footguns!