[Nix-dev] Bundling nix-expressions with source code

[Rickard Nilsson]

Den 2013-01-24 23:01:03 skrev Vladimír Čunát <vcunat at gmail.com>:

> On 01/24/2013 04:13 PM, Rickard Nilsson wrote:
>> OK, I see why that is not feasible. The reason I ask, is that it seems
>> reasonable that a Nix-aware upstream package developer should be able
>> to define how the package should be built (dependencies, build flags  
>> etc),
>> in tandem with the package development itself.
>>
>> I imagine that you in some way could define package names, versions,
>> source url, source checksum and other metadata in nixpkgs, and then
>> pick buildInputs, configureFlags etc from the source. But that is
>> more or less what we do today anyway, with the difference that we
>> pick a configure-script and a Makefile from the source instead of
>> Nix-expressions.
>
> I see nix is getting quite popular :-)
> The maintainer is of course welcome to maintain also the nix expression
> *within* nixpkgs, who else is a better candidate...

Yes, absolutely, and that is completely OK. But you might want to keep
an in-development default.nix in the upstream repo, too. It's actually
very nice to use Nix during development, for handling dependencies,
installing throw-away stuff in your profile, etc.

Oh well, this is just me thinking out loud.

   / Rickard