jobs.nix is unnecessary and restrictive

[ElvishJerricco]

nix-instantiate can handle nix expressions that are attribute sets of other derivations just fine, so ci.nix can just be passed directly instead of preprocessing it with jobs.nix. This is nice because the user can organize their ci.nix however they want; e.g. they can have it return a list or just a single derivation, and nix-instantiate will handle it fine.

The problem is recursive attribute sets. jobs.nix handles this currently, but it's a little ad-hoc and gross. The more proper way to support this is to just require them to use recurseIntoAttrs if they want a nested ci.nix:

with import <nixpkgs> {}; {
  a = drv1;
  b = recurseIntoAttrs {
    c = drv2;
    d = recurseIntoAttrs {
      e = drv3;
    };
  };
}

This works with nix-instantiate out of the box. No jobs.nix required.

[ocharles]

I'm not entirely following (I never said jobs.nix was necessary, it's there simply as it's sufficient to implement what I wanted). If you think you have something similar, I will happily take a PR. It might be easier to discuss this one over code.

[ocharles]

Oh, I think you're saying I don't need to do any processing of ci.nix. If that's true, that does indeed sound desirable.