[Nix-dev] Stable NixOS releases

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 05/21/2013 09:19 AM, Mathijs Kwik wrote:
> Vladimír Čunát <vcunat at gmail.com> writes:
>> I don't think we should do this. I thought about similar setups, but
>> IMHO they get way too much complicated for little gain. Reasons:
>>
>> (1) Proposed solution. I plan to do something like this:
>> 	let stable = (import ./nixpkgs-stable) {};
>> 	    master = (import ./nixpkgs-master) {};
>> 	in stable // {
>> 	    inherit (master) firefox /*...*/;
>> 	}
>
> This is not a true override though.
> In the case of libraries, everything in stable will still be using the
> stable version. Often, this is ok, but I don't like having multiple
> versions installed.

It isn't but it should always work even with (2) problems. I believe we 
should be able to compose a simple override that would take package from 
master and dependencies from stable. That should catch most use cases, 
like you want to try a new version but don't need whole new closure; and 
for things like nspr you would just have to override the override :-)


>> (2) Idea why it's so difficult to maintain: when updating e.g. firefox
>> it's often needed to update some libs (like nspr, etc.), so we would
>> have to split those as well and override them correctly for all other
>> packages using them (this gets more complicated with deeply-depended
>> libs like cairo). This is all solved by itself in (1).
>
> This can really become quite a large closure though, for example if we
> had a stdenv-updates merge in master.
>
>>
>> I don't think we want a setup that would need significantly more work,
>> our efforts are too spread out already.
>
> I agree on that.
> If I want some new version of a package backported, it's probably
> easiest to just add it to stable myself (versioned of course).

I suppose, for packages like firefox we will do that. I think all agree 
that non-default attributes can take major changes even in stable release.

For example firefox is always versioned, so all changes could be just 
applied, only the default version switch ("firefox(Pkgs)" attr) would 
remain the same.


Vlada


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