[Nix-dev] Question about organising dependencies not in core nixpkgs?

[Kirill Elagin]

I’d say there is a more general problem.

Imagine, that one day [in a far far away future] people start shipping
derivations in `default.nix` in their sources (I guess people who develop
on NixOS/with nixpkgs already do this as they have the file for their build
environment anyway, so why not commit it). And then we have two copies of
derivations: in the source repository and in `nixpkgs`.

So it really looks like having something like `fetchDerivation("…url…")`
would be handy. This function should fetch the source, unpack it, extract
`default.nix` and use it as derivation to build the already fetched source.
This way the `nixpkgs` repository itself is not required for packages that
have this kind of information shipped and other projects can depend
directly on the urls of repos. Then nixpkgs could be thought as a database
of “well-known” packages with their urls.

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 2:53 PM Luca Bruno <lethalman88 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 18/03/2015 12:37, Thomas Hunger wrote:
> > Thanks.
> >
> > That would require having the shell.nix library locally already
> > AFAICT. To rephrase slightly. Ideally I'd like to be able to do:
> >
> > myLibrary = fetchurl { ... };
> > extraDepends = import "${myLibrary}/depends.nix";
> > buildDepends = [ ... ] ++ extraDepends;
> >
> > Does that make sense?
> I understand that, but I think the best fit of nix usage is having all
> the nix expressions in the same repository, instead of spreading nix
> files on every repository. That is, what's nixpkgs is doing.
>
> So I would create a repo of all nix files, which fetch sources from your
> other repos.
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