[Nix-dev] Reorganization of the nixpkg file hierarchy

[Marc Weber]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 03:06:45PM -0500, John Altobelli wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> For the past week I've been working on a branch of nixpkgs that moves
> the packages into an file hierarchy modeled after the Gentoo portage
> system (http://gentoo-portage.com/Browse).  I have since completed the
> reorganization and would like to get the opinions of the developers
> here about whether they like this new hierarchy and whether it would
> be worth moving into mainline.

Even if this patch doesn't go into mainstream we should strive to lessen
the bad feeling gentoo users get when not knowing where to put packages.
I have to admit that I was close (maybe I even did) proposing such a
change as well.

So we should at least rethink about the policy and adding such a
sentence such as
  "If you don't know exactly where to put a package just put it into misc
  and stop worrying" (That's what I've done in the past :)

Eg its hard in nix to find all packages which use compiler X or such.
Why does this matter? If you get the wrong application you'll have to
wait till compiler A or tool B has been installed as well.
So in the past I enjoyed jumping into a gentoo dev-X ordner just to read
all description to see which open source software is availible to solve
a particular task. That the policy hasn't been enough was proven by some
people starting new sections:

  ### DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS
  ### SCIENCE/GEOMETRY
  ### SCIENCE/BIOLOGY
  ### SCIENCE/MATH
  ### SCIENCE/LOGIC
  ### SCIENCE / ELECTRONICS
  ### SCIENCE / MATH
  ### MISC

which I think has been a good change because you can just walk through
all MATH packages to see wether you should learn about another tool
which can be installed easily.

Meanwhile I've added a pointer to the policy at the top of
all-packages.nix.

Marc Weber