<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>