You should keep using derivation not stdenv.mkDerivation .

Using stdenv.mkDerivation is the only way to avoid duplicating its code. And with the various adapters, it is also the only extensible possibility. If you want to use derivation directly, then write your own stdenv, like so:

myStdenv = stdenv // { mkDerivation = args: derivation (args // { stdenv = myStdenv; }); };

I have updated the commit to be more concise; I forgot that cross-compiling will use stdenv properly.

I ran nox-review locally and it completed successfully (after 278f4a5), so the Travis failure can be ignored.

The other possibility would be to replace stdenv.mkDerivation, similarly to overrideCabal in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/haskell-modules/default.nix#L38, but either way the implementation will be tied to stdenv.
Perhaps we could move customisation.nix into pkgs/, since NixOS's only use is https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/lib/testing.nix#L181 and that is to override a package. (hydraJob would move to attrSets)

@lethalman I have updated this, now it does not use stdenv directly. Instead, stdenv.mkDerivation is passed to makeOverridable, and makeOverridable exposes the whole of function applications (via override, overrideDerivation, overrideInner.overrideDerivation, overrideInner.overrideInner.overrideDerivation, etc.). For backwards compatibility lib.overrideDerivation does the last in the chain, which is mkDerivation for everything in nixpkgs.

Unfortunately functors do not work under map (NixOS/nix#636), so this isn't mergeable at present, but it does work (with a few rebuilds due to the uses of overrideDerivation in-tree).

ping all

The last thing I heard was that @edolstra didn't like it, because it added 12% overhead: #10721 (comment). I didn't measure the overhead of the old fix but it's probably not as bad.

bump - I just ended up in a situation where I would need to overwrite meta.priority as well. Any thoughts on how this can proceed?

@gilligan you can use something like this https://github.com/jagajaga/my_configs/blob/master/.nixpkgs/common.nix#L6

Is this still relevant, now that we have overrideAttrs?

Well, #7425 is still open, but yeah this PR is pretty much useless now.