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

[Michael Raskin]

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On 08/20/2010 01:18 AM, Yury G. Kudryashov wrote:
>> 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.

Unfortunately, for most cases important changes (= those causing much
effort spent on fixing things) are not where you look for them. Diffs in
configure.ac are much longer than the meaning they represent if you use
Automake. And not thinking of these changes is usually less of a problem
than a subtle change of behaviour that is only mentioned in full Changelog.

> 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)?

No, it doesn't - different versions can be different expressions. Or
maybe a list of versions inside one expression.

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

This is technically trivial from my original requirements - find
update-supporting packages, try updating, svn diff. Or something like that.
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