[Nix-dev] NixON initiative

[Tim Cuthbertson]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 12:40 AM, Eelco Dolstra
<eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 28/02/16 15:35, zimbatm wrote:
>
>> No, not the dead president :) JavaScript has JSON and Nix has NixON. A subset of
>> the language that only contains literal values.
>>
>> Thanks to Tim Cuthbertson (@gfxmonk) nix-prefetch-git now outputs valid NixON.
>> Would it make sense to convert more of our tooling to using that notation forward ?
>
> I would prefer getting rid of the nix-prefetch-* scripts altogether, which
> should be possible soon:
>
> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/commit/d367b8e7875161e655deaa96bf8a5dd0bcf8229e

That sounds useful in terms of code simplicification, but a big draw
of making nix-prefetch-* output nix/json is the fact that you can have
a simple non-interactive build task which does nix-prefetch-git URL >
src.json

Your above proposal still looks like it involves manual copy-pasting
of the sha256 into the derivation file after you find out the digest,
and also knowing the commit SHA ahead of time.

I'd be more than happy to see both improvements at once though, if
that can work.