I recently got fairly confused why the following expression didn't have
any effect
{
description = "Foobar";
inputs.sops-nix = {
url = github:mic92/sops-nix;
inputs.nixpkgs_22_05.follows = "nixpkgs";
};
}
until I found out that the input was called `nixpkgs-22_05` (please note
the dash vs. underscore).
IMHO it's not a good idea to not throw an error in that case and
probably leave end-users rather confused, so I implemented a small check
for that which basically checks whether `follows`-declaration from
overrides actually have corresponding inputs in the transitive flake.
In fact this was done by accident already in our own test-suite where
the removal of a `follows` was apparently forgotten[1].
Since the key of the `std::map` that holds the `overrides` is a vector
and we have to find the last element of each vector (i.e. the override)
this has to be done with a for loop in O(n) complexity with `n` being
the total amount of overrides (which shouldn't be that large though).
Please note that this doesn't work with nested expressions, i.e.
inputs.fenix.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "...";
which is a known problem[2].
For the expression demonstrated above, an error like this will be
thrown:
error: sops-nix has a `follows'-declaration for a non-existant input nixpkgs_22_05!
[1] 2664a216e5
[2] https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/5790
