[Nix-dev] monitor.nixos.org

[phreedom at yandex.ru]

On Monday, November 28, 2016 13:32:16 Tomasz Czyż wrote:
> 2016-11-28 13:18 GMT+00:00 Profpatsch <mail at profpatsch.de>:
> > On 16-11-12 06:39pm, Rok Garbas wrote:
> > > On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 6:27 PM, Daniel Frank
> > > I wrote recently[1] how we tackle this problem at RelEng team at
> > > Mozilla. I'm slowly moving all my nix projects to do the same. I will
> > > also do the same for the packages I manage in nixpkgs at least that is
> > > what I will write to Santa this year, to give me more time to play
> > > work on nixpkgs :)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > [1] https://garbas.si/2016/updating-your-nix-sources.html
> > 
> > So you had a very similar idea about update scripts.
> > 
> > We should chat about that; I think there should be a system
> > in place for derivations to specify how the next version can
> > be found and if possible how to automatically update the version
> > tags & hashes.
> 
> debian has such a strategy:
> - https://wiki.debian.org/debian/watch

That happens to not work all that well:
https://github.com/Phreedom/nixpkgs-monitor/blob/master/debian-watchfiles/watchfiles.md

It turns out that debian watchfiles were much less reliable at getting updates 
from SourceForge, than a generic SourceForge updater. This is because naming 
schemes change, devs forget to update the updater script and lots of other 
tiny but important reasons.

In practice, having developers maintain package-specific update scripts is just 
as hard if not harder than maintaining the package itself.

This is why the strategy chosen for nixpkgs-monitor was to develop updaters 
that can tackle at least hundreds of packages.

-- Evgeny