[Nix-dev] haskell structure for all of nixpkgs

[Thomas Hunger]

> 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

IMO an advantage of checking package metadata into git is that we notice
upstream changes. E.g. GitHub used to re-package their zips all the time
causing hash changes which we noticed.

In the case of GitHub this was annoying (they fixed it) but in the more
general case I find the additional hash check very useful because it's one
less thing I have to worry about.

Not sure how to fix the nixpkgs repository size though if we check in
hundreds of MB of package metadata.


On 27 April 2016 at 10:59, Profpatsch <mail at profpatsch.de> wrote:

> 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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