Nixpkgs: Guided installer

[domenkozar]

Given that options are organized hierarchically and have type annotations, it should in principle be straightforward (though a decent amount of work) to have a general tool for guiding users through the options available in the install process. Bonus points if it can automatically partition/format drives based on the filesystems options.

Moved from https://github.com/NixOS/nixos/issues/99

[lukeadams]

comment on UI mockup by @nbp from the original issue:
reminds me of the Visual Studio Code configuration editor:

In our case, it would have a searchable list of options on the left, on the right only the local configuration.nix.

[nbp]

I want to add making the module system tooling friendly would be simple if we were to add a directory which contains a bunch of files, each having a single option definition.

Another point which might help would be to associate html form templates for each option type, and refine for some specific option declarations. Thus we could make a web UI for tuning each of these parameters. For example, we could a generic input type for strings, for packages, for integers, and have more specific one for timezones, keyboard layouts.

[davidak]

See also https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/21662

[stale[bot]]

Thank you for your contributions.

This has been automatically marked as stale because it has had no activity for 180 days.

If this is still important to you, we ask that you leave a comment below. Your comment can be as simple as "still important to me". This lets people see that at least one person still cares about this. Someone will have to do this at most twice a year if there is no other activity.

Here are suggestions that might help resolve this more quickly:

1. Search for maintainers and people that previously touched the related code and @ mention them in a comment.
2. Ask on the NixOS Discourse.
3. Ask on the #nixos channel on irc.freenode.net.

[davidak]

still needed to make nixos more accessible