`flakes` is a feature available in the unstable version of the `nix` package manager
to ease the distribution of nix expressions see https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-05-25-flakes/ .
Nix excels at software reproducibility and is available/can be
installed on different distributions (ubuntu/void/debian etc) as well
as macOS.
This flakes contains 3 packages that can be installed via for instance
`nix run 'github:neovim/neovim?dir=contrib#nvim-debug'`
or
`nix run 'github:neovim/neovim?dir=contrib'` for the default version.
you can register an alias
`nix registry add neovim 'github:neovim/neovim?dir=contrib'`
and the previous commands become:
`nix run neovim`