[Nix-dev] NiJS package manager

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Matthew Sackman's message of Tue Apr 01 11:12:32 +0000 2014:
> I'm guessing that the mechanical "let's attempt to translate
> $language-specific-deps-file into nix" has been tried and found wanting?
> I can see there's the node-packages-generated.nix, and others, but is
> that approach appropriate to all such languages?

@Matthew:

I think python in the past has had an option to determine the "depedencies" at
runtime.

ruby solves this by having different gem specs for different targets (JVM, ruby, operating system)

Haskell has a very complicated configuration system called "cabal" which allows
conditional descriptions such as:

flag is_windows

executable foo
  dependencies:
    if is_windows:
      lib-a
    else
      lib-b


We should not be against a new option, we should think harder about
collaborating so that all targets will work - which one is the best fit
for use cases - future might tell.

guile -> ecma script:
The difference is that guile has to compile everything to JS.
AFAIK what Sander suggested is having the js interpreter only read some
of all .js files - just enough to compile some packages (like nix does).

Anyway - if Eelco decides on "switching" - I'd like to remind that less
important policies might not be important at all :)

Do we have any idea how much time nix spends on "blocking IO" ?
I guess this would be interesting to know ..
I know there is some benchmarking code ..

Marc Weber