Not sure if this is the right solution for this. It might be possible for it to automatically throw such an error, I'll take a look at implementing this now.

@alyssais I did this ALL THE TIME when I first used NixOS, and I had to add a texteditor snippet to just never need to type it 😄

Not sure if this is the right solution for this. It might be possible for it to automatically throw such an error, I'll take a look at implementing this now.

@infinisil You mean in Nix?

@Synthetica9 In nixpkgs, the callPackage function can detect missing arguments and search for similar ones in that case. Seems to work, currently working on similarity search :)

And implemented! See #79877

I think it'd be a good idea to land this as a simple interim solution since #79877 seems mildly controversial, and simply revert it in that PR if people agree it's a reasonable approach.

I wish it was not an error, but a valid alias.

Maybe even rethink fetch* idiom. For example, put all fetchers into one collection:

fetch = {
  url = fetchUrl;
  zip = fetchZip;
  github = fetchFromGitHub;
  ...
};

{ stdenv, fetch, ... }:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
  srcs = [ 
    (fetch.url {
     ...
     })
    (fetch.github {
     ...
     })
  ];

I wish it was not an error, but a valid alias.

Then we’d get PRs from people with code that worked locally but didn’t work on OfBorg, because it (rightfully) doesn’t follow aliases.

@infinisil go ahead and revert when you get it working the better way :)