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

[Jakob Gillich]

I agree that the current folder structure is a mess. There is a severe
lack of structure, often there are further category-folders in a folder
with packages (like misc/, misc/themes/).

FreeBSD has categories at the root level, everything below are packages:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-categories.html[1]


Maybe this model could work for us, too?


They also have virtual categories for things like gnome; if we implement
something similar, that would allow maintainers of larger package sets
(@lethalman) to work as usual.

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016, at 01:04 AM, Tomasz Czyż 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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Links:

  1. https://freshports.org/categories.php
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