In Nixpkgs, the attribute in all-packages.nix corresponding to a
package is usually equal to the package name. However, this doesn't
work if the package contains a dash, which is fairly common. The
convention is to replace the dash with an underscore (e.g. "dbus-lib"
becomes "dbus_glib"), but that's annoying. So now dashes are valid in
variable / attribute names, allowing you to write:
dbus-glib = callPackage ../development/libraries/dbus-glib { };
and
buildInputs = [ dbus-glib ];
Since we don't have a negation or subtraction operation in Nix, this
is unambiguous.
