[Nix-dev] Auto package update script v3

[Marc Weber]

Hi Tobias,

sorry that I didn't review your code earlier.

The patch [1] contains one change which may be representative for all:

It adds a watchfile to perl.

What can still be improved ?
You should be using meta or passthru to not change the derivation hash
and to illustrate that the build process is not depending on the watchfile.

if the watchfile is only about 2 lines.. Why create a new file for it causing much overhead?
The overhead may not matter much - unless you start merging or moving files
around for whatever reason.

Why not just do:

  mkDerivation {
    name = "perl..

    meta = {
      watch = ''
      version=3
      http://cpan.perl.org/src/index.html perl-(5.10..*).tar.bz2
      '';
    };
   }

Is uscan already in nixpkgs?

Marc Weber

[1] patch I referred to:

  diff --git a/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/default.nix b/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/default.nix
  index 76928d1..b8344e9 100644
  --- a/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/default.nix
  +++ b/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/default.nix
  @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ in
   
   stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
     name = "perl-5.10.1";
  +  watchfile = "./watch";
   
     src = fetchurl {
       url = "mirror://cpan/src/${name}.tar.gz";
  diff --git a/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/watch b/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/watch
  new file mode 100644
  index 0000000..bc0cdd0
  --- /dev/null
  +++ b/pkgs/development/interpreters/perl-5.10/watch
  @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
  +version=3
  +http://cpan.perl.org/src/index.html perl-(5.10..*).tar.bz2