# Am I holding \`flox develop\` wrong?

**URL:** <https://discourse.flox.dev/t/am-i-holding-flox-develop-wrong/599>\
**Category:** Developing with flox\
**Created:** [December 30, 2022, 9:26am UTC](https://discourse.flox.dev/t/am-i-holding-flox-develop-wrong/599 "2022-12-30T09:26:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![limeytexan](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.flox.dev/limeytexan/32/10_2.png) [@limeytexan](https://discourse.flox.dev/u/limeytexan)\
**Post date:** [December 31, 2022, 10:09am UTC](https://discourse.flox.dev/t/am-i-holding-flox-develop-wrong/599/4 "2022-12-31T10:09:00Z")

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This is a great question that we’ve had a few times so I wanted to answer it separately so that we can include links to this response in documentation, etc.

> [@jacob](#):
>
> When interacting with flox, is the intention that you have flox-ception (flox operations from in a flox environment) and you only use the system flox to upgrade itself?

This is something we’ve put on the back burner for the short term as we work to port the CLI from the original (bash) “MVP” to the new rust rewrite, but the eventual goal is for the “system-installed” flox to:

- automatically pull the `flox/default` environment if it hasn’t been pulled already
- at some configurable interval (which can be zero to disable the feature), perform a background `git fetch` for the `flox/default` profile and warn or prompt users to perform an upgrade
- perform various “sanity checks” such as highlighting when the installed version of Nix is too old, and if necessary warn people to perform a “system upgrade” of flox
- finally, finish by invoking `exec path/to/flox/default/bin/flox @argv`

With this approach users will always invoke flox from the `flox/default` environment (even if it is not in their `PATH`), which will always be at or newer than the version installed in the “system”, but that can be rolled back as necessary if someone wants to explicitly pop back to use a previous version.

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