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

[Tomasz Czyż]

@Luca:
Why haproxy is more a tool and sigproxd is more application than tool?
./tools/networking/haproxy
./applications/networking/siproxd
Why there is no common networking category? (simple, because most programs
match multiple categories)

Same for "groups", why gnome-terminal is more gnome and not more terminal?

@Jonn
Could you give an example? I'm using nix ~0.5year and not familiar with all
internals yet.

2016-01-08 0:15 GMT+00:00 Jonn Mostovoy <jm at memorici.de>:

> Your approach holds for applications, but fails for libraries, or rather,
> for packages that are part of different ecosystems.
>
> There are some packages that just can't be taken out of their respective
> "contexts" without introducing indirection.
>
> I agree, however, that "packages in themselves" *can* be flattened, I'm
> not sure they should be though. Giving an option for a user to go over
> interesting to him parts of nixpkgs over tea, clicking with mouse and
> scrolling, learning about what's packaged and what's not might be not worth
> taking away.
> On Jan 8, 2016 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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>>
>>


-- 
Tomasz Czyż
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