[Nix-dev] Re: Creating a BIOLOGY section

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

pjotr2008 at thebird.nl (Pjotr Prins) writes:

> Do I add a description somewhere - I see very little of that in the
> package system (which I think is quite OK).

Normally, there *should* be descriptions.  If some are missing, then we
should add them.

At a bare minimum, I always try to have:

  meta = {
    description = "a one-line description";
    license = "a license";
         # Specify the version number for GPL/LGPL and a `+' if it's "or
         # later", e.g., "GPLv2+" for "GPL version 2 or later".
    homepage = http://the-url/;
  };

A `longDescription' field is a bonus.

> Do I need a svn account, or do I keep sending diffs?

Most (all?) contributors have an SVN account.  This is cool because it
quickly allowed Nixpkgs to have many contributors.  The downside is that
there's little peer review, and most of us end up hacking on their side
without having a lot of discussion to coordinate the efforts.  I think
we need to improve on this.

> +stdenv.mkDerivation {
> +  name = "clustalw2-2.0.5";
> +  src = fetchurl {
> +    url = ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/software/clustalw2/clustalw-2.0.5-src.tar.gz;
> +    md5 = "f18a332a61f9cd90fc7c88e122ef7487";

Use `sha256' instead of `md5'.  You can run

  nix-prefetch-url ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/software/clustalw2/clustalw-2.0.5-src.tar.gz

to obtain the base32-encoded sha256 of that file.

> +  buildInputs = [];

This is unnecessary.

And don't forget `meta = ...'.

Thanks,
Ludovic.