[Nix-dev] haskell structure for all of nixpkgs

[Eric Merritt]

Stewart,

As I was formulating a reply, I think this crystallized for me. At the moment Nix encodes
a lot of information in the file system/directory structure. Grep naturally surfaces that information. Due to this,
In the haskell packages that information doesn't exist and so is not surfaceable, regardless of the command used.

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to go into the root of your nixpkgs repo do the following:

$> grep -r bytestring ./

Then in the same place do

$> grep -r lwt ./

Notice the difference in comprehensibility and usefulness of the output .The first search is for a haskell package, the second
and ocaml package.

Arguably, I would say that that information shouldn't be encoded in the directory structure, it should be somewhere in the
nix expression. If there was a nix command that was expression aware and allowed me to do the 'bytestring' search and get
useful output like I get when I search for 'lwt', that would be very useful.

Eric


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Nix-dev] haskell structure for all of nixpkgs
Local Time: April 25, 2016 11:54 AM
UTC Time: April 25, 2016 6:54 PM
From: setori88 at gmail.com
To: eric at merritt.tech
CC: domen at dev.si,nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl

I see,

What would that tooling look like?
Can anyone else see any other drawbacks of this approach?
How do Haskellers deal with searching for packages?
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