[Nix-dev] distutils2nix/python4nix

[Florian Friesdorf]

On Sat, 24 Sep 2011 10:38:41 +0400, Michael Raskin <7c6f434c at mail.ru> wrote:
> >Before we start writing cabal2nix, perl2nix, X2nix: How should the
> >result look like?
> >There are 20.000 ruby packages!
> >And I personally don't like seeing more and more individual "let me
> >update just this package and then that cause I need it right now and I
> >don't know what this might break.." There is no choice unless we start
> >supporting constraints.
> 
> I am afraid this would mean building a solid general-purpose 
> data-grinding programming language into Nix. The idea to keep Nix small
> seems to be still held, and it will not help us build a constraint 
> solver.
> 
> We can - as usual - trade HDD space for sanity damage. That way every 
> version of every package has its preference of versions of all other 
> packages and we sometimes try to remove obsolete versions.

+1
 
> >In theory I've packaged all of those ruby packages. But do we really
> >want to checkout such masses of .nix files to get only 10 packages?
> >
> >Or would it be much better to query PyPi package database, cpan, ..
> >lazily (which would require changing nix?)
> 
> Or not Nix. If you have a way to programmatically generate all these 
> expressions, it is a no-brainer to find/write a FUSE FS tht will simply
> generate the file whenever it is needed. Default checkout will have some
> packages voted essential, and everyone can mount overlay and pretend all
> rubyforge is there.

+1

> The real problem with that solution would be deciding on policy of 
> keeping checksums. Of course, I could keep checksums locally. That would
> give me all local benefits of Nix (I can reproduce whatever I have ever
> done - maybe I should copy checksum DB over to be sure, but that seems 
> acceptable, if suboptimal), but denies global checksum synchronization.
> Maybe we could have some online service to use for that database.

I'm in favor of checksum synchronization. But for now I would just focus
on how to automatically generate nix trees for the various languages.

-- 
Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net>
  GPG FPR: 7A13 5EEE 1421 9FC2 108D  BAAF 38F8 99A3 0C45 F083
Jabber/XMPP: flo at chaoflow.net
IRC: chaoflow on freenode,ircnet,blafasel,OFTC
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20110924/25d88e2f/attachment.bin