[Nix-dev] Re: [Nix-commits] SVN commit: nix - r29021 - nixos/trunk/modules/misc

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On Thursday 08 September 2011 11:46:37 Nicolas Pierron wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 01:45, Yury G.  Kudryashov <urkud.urkud at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> > BTW, why do you think that packageOverrides is the only useful nixpkgs
> > option? I use config.gems as well. Of couse, I can rewrite rubygems-nix
> > magic to use packageOverrides but I'd prefer to have some time for
> > this...
> 
> packagesOverrides is the only one which is able to scale with less
> modifications.  Others options may need instrumentation inside
> all-packages.nix for each packages and for each flag.  I want to put
> flags such as Gentoo at the same level as packages and rely on
> callPackage to provide the right flags to the package expression.
> 
> Of course, both need package instrumentation to handle them but using
> callPackage avoid usage of getConfig inside all-packages.nix which is
> another mechanism which lead to more hand work and to more useless
> lines.
> 
>   grub = callPackage_i686 ../tools/misc/grub {
>     buggyBiosCDSupport = getConfig ["grub" "buggyBiosCDSupport"] true;
>   };

I had the same idea wrt flags some time ago, it would take some time and 
effort to standardize the names of global flags(used by multiple packages) and 
provide migration.

> My final goal is to get rid of all-packages.nix which I think to be an
> unnecessary index.

Probably you meant making it list only non-trivial packages? Also, there's a 
very strong opt-in culture in nix* which means that doing a callPackage on 
every *.nix file in some dir is a big no-no. I assume you plan an approach 
like module-list.nix as a replacement for trivial packages but you'd need some 
way to also specify package name?

-- 
Evgeny