Consider deprecating function names shadowing upstream #607
Description
We not infrequently see users confused about which implementation of use nix and use flake they're actually using. This is a solvable problem: We simply need to stop shadowing the names provided by direnv itself. Direnv authors have mentioned directly that this sort of behavior has undesirable effects upstream as well.
I will propose use_cached_flake and use_cached_nix as the new names and something like a year long deprecation period. First: We soft deprecate the names, pointing users at the new function names by way of a warning when invoking the old names, like so:
function use_cached_flake () {
# all the things we do now
}
function use_flake () {
_nix_direnv_warning "use_flake is a deprecated name alias for use_cached_flake and will become invalid after {some date? some version?}. Please update your .envrc to call use_cached_flake instead."
use_cached_flake "$@"
}After the target date passes or the target version is released, we can change the use_flake implementation to simply return an error or to call the upstream non-caching variants (wrapped with an error message?)
I'm open to discussing the naming of the new functions and target date and/or version as well as the short and long term impacts of this shift.