[Nix-dev] haskell structure for all of nixpkgs

[Profpatsch]

On 16-04-25 03:15pm, Eric Merritt wrote:
> I think these strongly win out, at at least for the Erlang/Beam world. The downside is that grepping the
> nixpkgs repository (my default way to search for a package) doesn't work nearly as well.

You are right, the „multiple releases“ approach clogs the repository.
In general it would be a lot more favourable if we didn’t have to check
in these thousands of package descriptions but could generate them
from hackage (or stackage) description files (aka don’t check in generated files).
Has the drawback, that it is not locally possible to see what’s available
without a generation step first. Generating nixexprs and then using them
is still an unsolved problem, since it puts realizations inside the evaluation
phase, see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/13 (notice the issue number).

Apart from that the gist of the Haskell infrastructure is how it handles
overriding, which is entirely unrelated to the grepping issue.

> My suspicion is that, if you wanted to go this route generally, you would need to improve the tooling
> around searching for packages/expressions.

There’s already nix-repl. Improve that one step further and you can have
dynamic exploration, maybe with a search and editor completion.


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