[Nix-dev] Re: Reorganization of the nixpkg file hierarchy

[Andres Loeh]

Having used both Gentoo and NixOS,
I don't see the advantage of Gentoo's categories over Nix's current system.
In fact, as other have pointed out, I think having a single level is
less convenient
than having a full directory structure. You say that for Gentoo, it's
immediately
obvious where to put a new package. Why? Just because there are more packages
in Gentoo, and it's easier to find a similar one? That'd hardly be an
argument for
the categorization, only one for putting more packages into Nix ...

Generally, cateogories serve a number of different purposes: organization of
packages, finding packages, and disambiguation of names. Organization only
applies to developers, and in the end, I don't care very much which system we
use. I think the current one is fine, actually. For finding packages, I strongly
believe that a keyword/tag system is superior to simple categories. Each package
should be allowed to have multiple tags. For disambiguation, Nixpkgs currently
doesn't have a system in place (whereas Gentoo categories are used for this
purpose as well). That might be worth thinking about, because
arbitrarily renaming
one of two conflicting packages seems a bit strange.

Cheers,
  Andres