[Nix-dev] Beginner question about external recipes

[Michael Raskin]

<E1RWife-0002zE-00.7c6f434c-mail-ru at smtp24.mail.ru>)
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>I guess you could write 80% succesful converter of Debian packages into
>> Nix expressions, but that would be a lot of work.
>>
>
>More or less, I was thinking of Nix expressions to control some external
>packaging mechanism (apt, makechrootpkg/pacman, rpmbuild/rpm) rather than
>trying to convert the recipies themselves to Nix expressions. I've been
>pondering this specific topic (and Nix in general) over the weekend.  I've
>read some of the early papers on Nix, but I still may be struggling with
>some of the concepts...particularly those related to functional
>programming. Point out errors or insanity.
>
>For context, my near term interest is to control an ArchLinux environment
>for:
>
>1] rollback capability
>2] better closure determination for "point upgrades" (individual packages).
>3] Automatic rebuilds of "customized" packages.
>
>Note I'm not thinking to augment ArchLinux. I'm thinking to place instances
>of ArchLinux under the control of something which understands closures and
>their manipulation. This should generalize to other distributions as well.
>Certain key assumptions need to be met, of course:

I cannot understand what you want to do.

Should Arch build scripts run unmodified? In this case, how do you 
untangle the effects of various packages registering their mime-types
in /usr/share? If you want to parse the recipes, you will have to 
fix some underspecification of expressions anyway.