[Nix-dev] Separate repository for autogenerated lists of urls and hashes

[Freddy Rietdijk]

Hi,

Autogenerating lists with urls and hashes has been discussed before
[1,2,3], but I like to bring it up again as I'm working on autogenerating a
list with urls and hashes for Python's PyPI packages along with other meta
data [4].

At this point I chose to only retrieve data for specific packages instead
of all of PyPI. I think that's the sensible thing to do do since PyPI
contains a lot of junk. Even so, the autogenerated list with urls, hashes
and meta data can become quite large, especially as I chose to retrieve the
data for all versions of a package.

What I propose is that we split Nixpkgs basically in two, we keep Nixpkgs
that contains expressions, and we create another repository, Nixsrcs, that
contains scripts and autogenerated lists. These autogenerated lists will
contain *all* versions of a package. Nixpkgs would import these lists as
derivations (so we do need one small autogenerated list in Nixpkgs).

When building packages we can optionally specify a version. If a version is
not specified the latest available version will be built. Likely we do need
to limit somewhat the amount of versions in the autogenerated lists, but
that is something we need to find out. One nice feature to have is version
comparison, so we can just write the major version and let Nix determine
the latest minor version.

What do you think? Can it be done? Am I missing something? I guess it's a
matter of 'just doing'.

Freddy



[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/14897
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/18932
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/18595
[4] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/14927
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