[Nix-dev] Flattening pkgs tree in nixpkgs/pkgs

[Tomasz Czyż]

After playing for a while with a nixpkgs repo I have impression that
categories/directories are just waste of time.

* Have to be maintained
* Harder to find things
* Lack of any package manager which tells about it

Each time I want to find a package name I do
* find -name '*name*'
or use github search to locate files in repo.

>From maintaining perspective:

(for x in `ls`; do n=$(ls $x|wc -l);echo "$n - $x";done)|sort -n
1 - backup
2 - inferno
2 - search
3 - gis
4 - display-managers
10 - altcoins
11 - science
11 - taxes
20 - virtualization
25 - kde-apps-15.12
27 - office
41 - version-management
41 - window-managers
42 - networking
59 - video
60 - editors
85 - graphics
186 - audio
224 - misc

Do you see that? It's hard to define all those categories levels, some of
directories have subdirectories (like applications) other not (servers).
It's hard to follow.
Most people know the name of the software, if not, they probably use google
to find it, not using categories.

Let's make the layout more clear, more accessible and easy to follow.

What do you think about moving all packages into flat namespace?

Let's say you have

pkgs/package1/default.nix
pkgs/package2/default.nix

or even better:

pkgs/my-package.nix
pkgs/gcc.nix
pkgs/gcc-5.0.nix

then, you can autogenerate top-level.pkgs

I'm happy to help implementing that.
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