They are both as powerful, but buildEnv is treacherous: if you pass a
package which depends on another python (for example the one of unstable
when you are on stable) it will be *silently* dropped, leading to hair
pulling.
Use case:
override neovim from unstable, but still keep stable's pythonPackages.
This solves the following bug:
opening neovim in nix-shell -p pythonPackages.numpy does not enable to
run successfully
:!python -c "import numpy"
because the PYTHONPATH is wiped by the neovim wrapper.
This wiping is necessary for the python providers, though, otherwise a
python2 nix-shell will make the python3 provider read python2 files.
We wrap the providers only, instead of neovim as whole.
Lots of packages are missing versions in their name. This adds them
where appropriate. These were found with this command:
$ nix-env -qa -f. | grep -v '\-[0-9A-Za-z.-_+]*$' | grep -v '^hook$'
See issue #41007.