[Nix-dev] Anyone against giving the nixpkgs attrset a reference to itself?

[Nicolas Pierron]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Mathijs Kwik <mathijs at bluescreen303.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Nicolas Pierron <nicolas.b.pierron at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 12:32 AM, Mathijs Kwik <mathijs at bluescreen303.nl> wrote:
>>> I would like to add the final nixpkgs attrset (defaults + overrides)
>>> to itself (named finalPkgs).
>>> As this is a somewhat strange thing to do, I thought it would be best
>>> to ask first :)
>>
>> strange ?  No, this is the base principle of NixOS.  In fact I would
>> almost recommend you to use a similar idea because I think we should
>> get rid of __override.
>>
>> […]
>>
>> Then we can extend this list with various index files either search at
>> default locations, given as arguments or listed in an environment
>> variable.
>
> That sounds very extensible indeed.
> Can this also be used to override certain attributes of other package
> sets (like kde or emacs in your example) in such a way that other
> (rec) attributes of the originating package set "see" it (like
> __override gives us)?
>
> Because I don't just want to add completely separate package sets, but
> modify the behaviour of the "official" set as well.

Indeed, the latest example does not allow to override, but we can
imagine to merge by using some-kind of priority flag within the
derivation if there is a collision, and then only throw if 2
derivations have the same rank.


-- 
Nicolas Pierron
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasbpierron - http://nbp.name/