[Nix-dev] Re: Auto-updating sources: handling the general case

[Yury G. Kudryashov]

Michael Raskin wrote:

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> Hello
> 
> What features I want:
> 1) Automatically maintain version correspondence between source name and
> package name.
> 2) Update package to given (as URL or otherwise) source version.
> 3) Automatically update packages to the latest version (if a fresher
> version is available).
> 
> What properties I want or understand others wanting:
> 1) One file per expression.
> 2) Not too much implied formatting restrictions that cannot be expressed
> in Nix terms. I.e. comments, attribute ordering, formatting etc. are not
> supposed to matter in Nix expressions and making them matter sometimes
> may be not nice.
> 3) An approach that can cover fetchsvn etc. if needed.
4) Show diff for relevant files (configure.ac, CMakeLists.txt, Makefile.am 
etc.)

Otherwise people will just upgrade blindly and miss some important changes.

5) (optional) If package applies some patches, try to apply them.

6) An easy way to maintain several versions and *add* new one instead of 
overriding the old one.

Does this contradict 1)?

7) Notify the maintainers when newer version is available without changing 
nix expression (cron job on nixos.org?).