Could you try to get upstream to upload the package to elpa/melpa?

Sure. Asked for that in org-roam/org-roam#171

I'd like to upload to MELPA when things become more stable, which is when I decide it's version 1.0.0.

A melpa release won't happen any time soon. The question is, do we want org-roam in nixpkgs now, or should I stash it in my overlay?

I would go for nixpkgs as org-roam is quite an active project and gets excellent traction (see pulse). I've been using 0.1.2 for two weeks now, and I find it quite stable and useful.

@adisbladis, what do you think?

A melpa release won't happen any time soon.

Within the next week I think!

oh wow. that's great news! I think we should wait then :)

Great! I was just going to say "let's just add it", but if a proper MELPA release is coming soon then let's wait for it :)

I'm closing this for now since the package will arrive in Nixpkgs through the usual MELPA workflow.

Can we now install org-roam from our NixOS configuration?

I've tried the obvious way, by adding org-roam to my epkgs.melpaStablePackages definitions, and I get the following error when I try to build:

error: undefined variable 'org-roam' at /etc/nixos/emacs.nix:16:7

Two of you have made public your NixOS configurations; I cloned them and grepped (case insensitive) for roam and found nothing.

Here's the commit where I made the change, and here's the complete file including that change.

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/emacs-can-i-install-a-package-declaratively-after-trying-it-out-procedurally/7559/1

Hey @JeffreyBenjaminBrown!

It's in melpaPackages, not melpaStablePackages. Move org-roam just a couple of lines below under with melpaPackages—that should help.

FWIW, here is the relevant part of my config: README.org:671

I tried putting it under melpa instead of melpaStable. I even tried under elpa. They all give me the same error, except with a different line number.

It's as if Nix is looking at an old Melpa repo when it tries to build my config. Your config includes company, which I didn't know about and looks cool, so I tried adding that to my melpaPackages declarations and it installs fine. But company-roam and org-roam generate errors when I do likewise with them.

So I tried adding the overlay you mentioned. First time overlaying, and I don't know if I added it the right way. How I added the overlay didn't generate an error but neither did it solve this problem.

I tried to understand your .org file that turns into your .nix files. Oh my god, I haven't felt so stupid in years; I don't even know what I would have to study to understand it. When I run org-babel-tangle it actually deletes the three lines containing the word roam from the .nix files in your repo, but I tried studying those files after restoring them to their original state and can't make heads or tails of it.

@JeffreyBenjaminBrown

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }: {} is syntax for "create a function that takes an attrset where pkgs defaults to import <nixpkgs> {}".

The thing is you are explicitly passing pkgs here https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/nixos-experiments/blob/master/packages.nix#L5 which makes the entire overlay addition moot.

What you should be doing is adding the overlay to the NixOS option nixpkgs.overlay as shown in the overlay README: https://github.com/nix-community/emacs-overlay#latest-master-each-rebuild.

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/my-first-overlay-for-emacs/7570/1

Thanks! I thought that might be happening, but it was the only thing I tried that compiled.

I had looked at the section of the emacs-overlay README you mention, and also the NixOS wiki article on overlays, and was totally baffled. I just started a new thread on the NixOS Discourse to tackle that problem.