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

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 01/08/2016 02:53 PM, Daniel Peebles wrote:
> I think the categories/directories could make more sense than they do
> today, and that all-packages.nix should be abolished

The largest problem I see for categorization is ambiguity (mentioned
already). The "categories" will always overlap nontrivially, so we would
better track such information in a different way than directory
structure, e.g. meta.tags = [ "foo" "bar" "baz" ]; (perhaps even
hierarchical tags).

Currently a significant portion of our packages is in
pkgs/development/libraries/ - which is a rather bad category IMO. If I
didn't use tab-completion, I would've pushed this issue hard long time
ago already.

Personally, I would make it much flatter and also make it (almost)
exactly correspond to our *attribute* hierarchy.

We had some discussion around this on NixCon. IMO best time to execute
this will be during release stabilization to minimize cherry-pick
conflicts due to file renames, but first we need a clear consensus.


Vladimir


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