[Nix-dev] Re: Hey, this looks interesting

[Tony White]

2009/7/22 Lluís Batlle <viriketo at gmail.com>:
> 2009/7/21 Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org>:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Tony White <tonywhite100 at googlemail.com>
>> writes:
>>
>>> http://oswatershed.org/
>>
>> Interesting project.
> I agree.
>>
>>> Maybe a NixOS addition to the distro section would be worth an ask?
>>
>> Yes, IMO.
> The guy has the web site code stored in github. I guess he would
> better welcome a patch to add NixOS, instead of getting him all
> familiar with it.
> http://github.com/tannewt/open-source-watershed/tree/master
> As far as I read from the front page (last paragraph), he is the only
> guy working on that site.
>>
>>> Could oswatershed be useful to NixOs or does Hydra already have a
>>> mechanism to discover upstream releases?
>>
>> No.
> At first glance I thought oswatershed was for competing among
> distributions ;) I didn't think it would be of any usage other than
> feeling happy of being ahead of other distros. hehe
>
> Regards,
> Lluís.
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>

Hi,
Yeah, the tracking of distributions for freshness is a not the
strength of the site IMO, it's the grouped tracking of upstream
releases and how that information can be manipulated automatically.
There would of course be the question of how reliable the oswatershed
data is and whether it tracks every project.

OpenSuSe should always come out on top if oswatershed tracks it's
factory distribution, which I believe their developers already have
some method to track upstream automatically but their developers don't
actually push the version to the repo until the build succeeds and
possibly some tests are passed.
Because the oswatershed developer has done lots of the ground work, it
seems silly to re-invent something that's already there and maybe can
be used.
If I knew any python, I'd dig right in. ;)
Hydra could beat OpenSuSe factory by just trying to build everything
as it usually does using the updated releases information from
oswatershed to build fresh releases once a day.
Failed builds may increase in the short term but it might result in a
different workload for expression maintainers in the long run. Maybe
even possibly leaving more time for good work in a good few instances.

Download, sha256sum/md5sum, update expression, test build to fail,
then patch or fix expression would become visit hydra and see what's
broken, examine the log, grab the source, fix and update the
expression. I guess.

Of course, my personal dream of having a set of nix expressions that
pull upstream source straight from bleeding edge cvs, svn, git, etc
and fall back to the last tested working release revision from the
same cvs, svn, git, etc repo if the build fails, probably wouldn't
work at all using oswatershed's data. But it is a wild idea and would
involve hydra, something I haven't even setup yet here and yes it
would introduce a minefield, I know.
If I ever try that, it's a long way off.

Manipulating released updates as soon as upstream make them and
automatically is certainly interesting from a security update
perspective.
Great for enterprise Linux where you want the security updates but
don't want to break anything. Compared to rpm, nix is perfect for
that.

All in all I can see that the site does have some kind of future but I
think the developer has his hands full, he'll need to track the
various branches of each distro (Stale, unstable, experimental, etc)
And also deal with some of the trolls that misinterpret his intentions
and see his site as one big competition by ignoring them.

I don't think putting the NixOS stable branch release on oswatershed
would look very good but a more up to date branch might.

Thanks,
Tony