[Nix-dev] Re: overview about hack-nix and how it works

[Marc Weber]

> I am not quite sure what idea you're referring to,
I was referring to the "perfect" tool which minimizes packaging
time. I feel that a complete solution must do dependency
analysis in some way because everything else will work for most
packages being mainstream only. By mainstream I mean authors updating
packages so that they work with latest gtk etc.
That both leksah and -server can be build with all ghc's in
haskell-packages illustrate that Haskell maintainers do a very good job.

>  > - you think its broken by design?
> No, I don't think that. I cannot judge whether hack-nix is good or not.
> All I can judge whether it does what I need or not. Those two things are
> different.
Which in turn makes me think that its fun to you copy pasting cabal2nix
output into haskell-packages then start try-and-error compiling.
That's my perception. If that's the case (let's call it "playing" the
way you did) - then we indeed have different goals. When I started
hack-nix the new "split-base" was introduced. Thus many packages did
only build with one or the other version. I feared that package
management would keep being that complicated.

>  >>>>> me: If you have time to rewrite it.. go on and do it.
>  >>>> you: Actually, that effort is well underway.
>  >>> me: How will the design look [..]?
>  > no reply
"underway" triggered the feeling "being incomplete".
cabal2nix has been in use and it seems like it does its current job very
well (cause you've updated lot's of packages).
That's why I'm wondering whether your needs are limited to what
cabal2nix does now.

Of course I knew how to get cabal2nix. I'm reading the commit messages
to the mailinglist. Thus I didn't miss the fetchgit call.
I didn't have a look at it because I had the impression that all it is
doing is taking cabal files turning them into nix expression - letting
you do all the hard work of testing and patching afterwards if required.
Looking at its code makes my impression even stronger.

So do you think cabal2nix is feature complete? I mean will it always
turn cabal files into nix expressions only or do you want to extend it
to be more - maybe turning it into something like cabal is?
cabal2nix in its current shape does not compete with hack-nix.
So by me asking "do you want to rewrite" and you replying "is underway"
I assumed that you're going to tackle something of similar complexity
which probably was a wrong assumption (because our goals differ).
And in that case I would have asked you again to give hack-nix a try
which would take about 5min: download any cabal project, run hack-nix
--build-env. source env. compile. done.


Anyway - whenever your mind changes - you're welcome. Just ping me.

Thanks for having taken the time for replying again. It has clarified a
lot.

Marc Weber