I hope there will be, but I'm not really sure. I think the future of Nix is in smaller, focused flakes being shared and exchanged. People dunk on projects like Rust and Node for having infinity dependencies, but it is that way because those ecosystems have rich library ecosystems that are worth using. I see the same thing happening in Nix.
Regularization of more Flake outputs into schemas sounds compelling. E.g. thanks to this great work on flake schemas, do the definitions of outputs related to NixOS modules, NixOS configs, and nixpkgs overlays even need to be pre-baked into Nix?
In terms of this decomposition effort, one additional thing that would be really nice to see would be turning flake URL schemes & updaters extensible. One could imagine some kind of a dictionary that maps from schemes to derivations that contain the code needed to get the primitive URL for the "latest" version of the flake when an update is called for.
I totally agree. This is one of the reasons we made FlakeHub, to make a better update mechanism that was flexible and supported things that aren't just github as sources. I think that'll happen, it'll just take a bit of time, and likely experimenting outside of nix before patches land upstream.
