nixpkgs/doc/introduction.xml

<chapter xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
         xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
         xml:id="chap-introduction">

<title>Introduction</title>

<para>This manual tells you how to write packages for the Nix Packages
collection (Nixpkgs).  Thus it’s for packagers and developers who want
to add packages to Nixpkgs.  End users are kindly referred to the
<link xlink:href="http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nix/trunk/tarball/latest/download-by-type/doc/manual">Nix
manual</link>.</para>

<para>This manual does not describe the syntax and semantics of the
Nix expression language, which are given in the Nix manual in the
<link
xlink:href="http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nix/trunk/tarball/latest/download-by-type/doc/manual/#chap-writing-nix-expressions">chapter
on writing Nix expressions</link>.  It only describes the facilities
provided by Nixpkgs to make writing packages easier, such as the
standard build environment (<literal>stdenv</literal>).</para>

</chapter>