[Nix-dev] Nix(OS) on upcoming sprints/events

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Florian Friesdorf's message of Mon Feb 06 03:26:46 +0100 2012:
> So far your approach did not find acceptance to be used for nixpkgs
> trunk
Not sure what your statement is based on. It not being in trunk?
...
No wonder that its not accepted because it depends on my 'arbitary
strings as names' patch for nix. I asked Eelco multiple times to review
it - because I'm not a C/C++ programmer. Nothing happened.
It allows you to write:
  { "abc" = 7; }

What's the current status of it? still waiting for being reviewed?

> I'd like to be able to tell my tools that I want python application X, Y
> and Z packaged for nixpkgs and it will determine it's dependencies and
> create the derivations for them, which I then can check into mainline
> nixpkgs.
line 328 illustrates how it could look like:
http://gitorious.org/nixpkgs-python-overlay/nixpkgs-python-overlay/blobs/master/default.nix
and all those dependencies from line 341 on were not found on PyPi that
time. In the end I used the line 268 (env containing pip) to install the
rest because fixing the nix code took too much time.

Its not perfect. But good enough to evaluate this kind of "creating
derivations on the fly" for python.

> and I don't see how it is possible to easily modify a nix
> expression for a specific package.
See "patches" attr names here (pushed it some minutes ago):
  http://gitorious.org/nixpkgs-python-overlay/nixpkgs-python-overlay/blobs/master/pkgs/defaults.nix
This way you can patch derivations.

> However, maybe I am completely off and your approach just needs more
> documentation to find acceptance.
It depends. Not everybody wants to have recipes for all versions of all
python packages .. But for development it may be nice because you don't
have to generate .nix files to get started.

> That's interesting information - can you point me to them. I would not
> want to waste time on an approach (querying pypi) if it's doomed anyway,
> but instead would download to figure out the dependencies.
See pyramid example above. I have to admit that I don't know those
libraries very well. I tried getting them working because someone else
wanted to run a web app on my server.

Yours
Marc Weber