[Nix-dev] Reorganization of the nixpkg file hierarchy

[Michael Raskin]

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John Altobelli wrote:
> Michael, that's a pretty interesting idea.  I see it almost like
> keywords for each package and these tags could then automatically (via
> a script) create syslinks in another file hierarchy.  Maybe a
> pkgs_flat directory could be added alongside pkgs and contain all the
> syslinks organized in the portage based system.

I think there would be a few distinct symlink farms: Gentoo-like
(Debian-like, Fedora-like) would be one of them. Simply links to the
leaves with their paths (/ -> -) as names would also make sense. Or
maybe only basenames.

> A question would be where do these tags go?  Should they be in
> all-packages.nix, the default.nix file, or as a .tags file within each
> package folder?

Package tags should (in my opinion) be maintained as SVN-contolled
symlinks.

> The problems I could see would be that someone makes a new package and
> doesn't run the script, or doesn't manually add the syslinks.

Well, the package will be untagged for a while. So tagging
"classification leaves" becomes more important.

> It's good to see a couple of people agree that the current system is
> not perfect.  My biggest gripes with the system is that there aren't

No one claims it is perfect. Most of people (including me), though,
prefer to change it step-by-step as opposed to radically and at once.

> enough division among the organizational structure, there are way too
> many packages in misc, and I don't believe there should ever be be an

Nearly everyone seems to agree that misc/ and development/libraries
should be split up. It's just a consistent classification for them
written down that is missing..

> os-specific folder.  A windows application that runs the same function
> as a linux application should be right next to each other.  The

Once you say application, you missed the point. Now you have "a Linux
kernel module for ..." or "a tool for setting up a ... via Linux ...
extensions" there. Really, we'd better split them into drivers,
configuration tools and low-level/misc, but again - the details should
be discussed separately and just hopping to Gentoo system looks much
worse than waiting and splitting while keeping its place in overall layout.

> delineation should be within the package.  I think default.nix should
> be changed to default_linux.nix and if the same package could be
> compiled on windows there should be a default_win.nix.  But I have

No. Two cases: if it is the same package (main part of source code is
from the same team) - default.nix could check system type to apply
OS-specific patches. If not - these are two packages in the same part of
classification.
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