This ensures that stdenv / setup hooks take $IN_NIX_SHELL into
account. For example, stdenv only sets
NIX_SSL_CERT_FILE=/no-cert-file.crt if we're not in a shell.
Thus
$ nix dev-shell
will now build the 'provides.devShell' attribute from the flake in the
current directory. If it doesn't exist, it falls back to
'provides.defaultPackage'.
'nix dev-shell' is intended to replace nix-shell. It supports flakes,
e.g.
$ nix dev-shell nixpkgs:hello
starts a bash shell providing an environment for building 'hello'.
Like Lorri (and unlike nix-shell), it computes the build environment
by building a modified top-level derivation that writes the
environment after running $stdenv/setup to $out and exits. This
provides some caching, so it's faster than nix-shell in some cases
(especially for packages with lots of dependencies, where the setup
script takes a long time).
There also is a command 'nix print-dev-env' that prints out shell code
for setting up the build environment in an existing shell, e.g.
$ . <(nix print-dev-env nixpkgs:hello)
https://github.com/tweag/nix/issues/21
