https://search.nixos.org/packages: installation suggestions for libraries are incorrect

[FRidh]

Introduce your stance
As an expert user I notice a mistake on the search page which will teach new users something that is incorrect and will not function.

Describe the issue
The packages search page shows for each package how to install it with nix-env, in your NixOS configuration or with nix-shell. This method is correct for executables, however, it is incorrect for everything else, especially libraries. Users will not get the behavior they would expect from it.

Page links
Any package on https://search.nixos.org/packages.

Additional context
We should probably tag packages with whether they provide executables so the website can use that as input to decide whether to show this example or not.

Whether to show these examples is a trade-off. It is convenient for a novice user to see the line they need to use or add, however, they likely will make the mistake adding libraries and get surprised it does not give them the behaviour they seek.

• I already created a Pull Request

[yukiisbored]

https://search.nixos.org is maintained in this repository: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-search

nixos-homepage only covers the https://nixos.org website.

[FRidh]

Thanks! I see it has been reported there as NixOS/nixos-search#506.