[Nix-dev] [***SPAM***] A bunch of patches to nixpkgs and questions

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Jan Malakhovski's message of Tue Jun 26 18:56:26 +0200 2012:
> I'm kind of confused with gist vs. pull request controversy. I did carefully read the thread about moving to github, but still don't get this nonlinear history/merge problem.

Well - the gist was meant to also take care about your dirty things
while pull requests should be "clean patches" ready to merge with
upstream.

Its about a central place we can share code - and look for code if
something doesn't work suspecting somebody might already have found a
solution.

> No offense, but I feel that gists somehow diminish contributions (or maybe I don't understand the idea behind them).
Some patches take time - take many iterations - and are controversy.
Eg in your case if I find a small thing to fix I could just fix it
without asking anybody creating a new commit.

> By the way, https://gist.github.com/2995911 says "Sorry, this Gist
> contains too many files. Delete some to view it. (Consider creating a
> GitHub repository instead!)".
Yes - but the git access (cloning / pushing) should still work.
I know that the gist git interface is lacking features (no commenting
etc). But its a place people can push their current versions of patches
while waiting for feedback on the mailinglist - so things don't get
losts.

Well - important patches should still be sent to the mailinglist.

> P.S. The question that doesn't leave my mind alone: "How should I sort
> the items in top-level/all-packages.nix?"

If you're using Vim get github.com/MarcWeber -> vim-addon-nix which
introduces folding based on ### markers. If not just grep for those -
they split the file into pieces by category.

Within those categories all derivations having indenting level of two
spaces should be ordered lexicographically. There are some exceptions -
sometimes it makes sense to put a related derivation nearby the other
one so that it doesn't get missed when patching etc.

I mostly search with regerx ^<space><space>clojure for example which is
almost always a fast match. I even created a mapping in Vim..

There is/was somewhere a document helping you to find the right location.
But current discussion about whether there should be a top level fonts.
attribute show that we don't know either in all cases :(

Thus "do whatever makes sense" applies very often.

In fact there are battles ( :) ) going on about how much should be packaged
manually or automatically (eg hack-nix vs the haskell-packages.nix
implementations) same happens with ruby packages (my ruby overlay).

That's one of the reasons why I feel its too early for too many
policies.

Marc Weber