[Nix-dev] Publish All of Hackage

[Ericson, John]

Yeah longer term https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/520 can be of use, but
for now normal fetchgit should be fine for the reasons Oliver mentions. 52
megs is something, but its only a compile-time dep, and in quite long term
I hope things like IPFS means the hashes can be checked out incrementally.

> Honestly, though, IMO the nix/nixpkgs model of "determine the build
exactly from the expressions" simply does not match the modern
language-specific package manager model of "dynamically query a web service
for the latest versions that meet my constraints". I think something
leveraging nix-exec [2] might be a good short-term solution, and in the
long term better management of impurities (at the expression level,
resulting in still-pure *builds*) is needed.

That incongruity is real, but the things like Stack, and Rust's Cargo's and
Ruby's bundler's lockfiles convince me that perhaps those tools are a bit
too non-deterministic for even more mainstream tastes. Not quite sure what
the optimal setup looks like but I trust we will get there.

Lastly, I mailed list before about this
https://www.mail-archive.com/nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl/msg17048.html The
big points are all already in this thread, but a few ideas on the details
there.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 6:42 AM, Oliver Charles <ollie at ocharles.org.uk>
wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 1:58 PM Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:
>
>> The problem with doing this with import-from-derivation is we still
>> need the hashes of every tarball ahead of time (though that's much
>> smaller than all of hackage, and we really just need the hash of the
>> file that contains all the hashes in nixpkgs itself). If we have that,
>> then we don't need to generate all of hackage every time, just the bits
>> needed to build the specific requested package.
>>
>
> What I would expect is that the "generate Nix expressions" Nix expression
> - i.e., the thing that generates what is now hackage-packages.nix - would
> have to be given known inputs. As far as I understand, hackage2nix simply
> requires a checkouts of
> https://github.com/commercialhaskell/all-cabal-hashes and
> https://github.com/commercialhaskell/all-cabal-hashes. I would expect
> that those could be provided by fetchgit, so updating the set of Haskell
> packages simply requires Peter or other commiters to change the pinned Git
> revisions.
>
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