Is it possible to use flake-compat without flakes enabled?

[jalaziz]

My understanding was that flake-compat could be used to enable the use of flakes with stable Nix. However, when I run nix-shell for my devShell based project, I receive:

error: experimental Nix feature 'flakes' is disabled; add '--extra-experimental-features flakes' to enable it

Am I misunderstanding the purpose of flake-compat?

[justinas]

The purpose is to allow you to import a flake into a non-flake Nix project.

for my devShell based project,

If you're making your own flake.nix, and using flake-enabled commands such as nix shell (you mentioned nix-shell, but I'm not sure if you meant to?), you still need to enable the flakes experimental feature.

[edolstra]

The purpose is to allow you to import a flake into a non-flake Nix project.

That's right. It shouldn't be necessary to enable the flakes experimental feature.

The purpose is to allow you to import a flake into a non-flake Nix project.

No, that's what builtins.getFlake is for.