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

[Luca Bruno]

I don't like the idea. It's a mess. It's a mess for people maintaining
environments, like kde or gnome.

So I propose to still have directories, but chosen by maintainers. For
example I don't want all the gnome3 packages to be in a flattened directory
together with everything else.
Pretty sure the same applies to our toolchain and base system tools, or
kernel stuff, kde, Xorg stuff, ecc.


On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 1:04 AM, Tomasz Czyż <tomasz.czyz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>


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