[Nix-dev] Three questions about node2nix

[Rodney Lorrimar]

Hi Sander,

(Apologies to nix-dev who didn't receive my original message because I
sent it with the wrong address)

On Sun, Sep 11 2016, Sander van der Burg wrote:

> 1. Not yet, it will break a couple of non-NPM packages that have
> dependencies on them. I'm still in the progress of replacing them, but this
> will take some time. Once these packages have been fixed, the old npm2nix
> package set is obsolete.

Ah yes I see now -- I was only looking in all-packages.nix.

> 2. At the moment no. Ideally, it would be better to have a more
> sophisticated approach that would only regenerate affected pieces while
> leaving others intact. I believe this is something nixfromnpm implements,
> but node2nix does not having something like that.

Maybe, it seems like a lot of work to implement. IMO, the ideal
situation is that each node.js program is nix-shrinkwrapped, but without
the enormous amount of fluff in the main repo (fluff in auxiliary repos
would be fine).

> 3. This is indeed one the packages I have encountered that need to be
> fixed. Unfortunately, one of node2nix's undesired side effects is that is
> generates a lot of code churn when updating the package set. I guess for
> now we just have to live with it.

I'm not sure whether it's worth the trouble, but could the code churn be
mitigated slightly by using a compact generated format -- e.g.

    { buildNP, np }:
    buildNP { name = "generated-node-packages"; parts = [
    (np "colors" "0.6.0-1" "6dbb68ceb8bc60f2b313dcc5ce1599f06d19e67a")
    (np "ejs" "2.3.4" "3c76caa09664b3583b0037af9dc136e79ec68b98")
    # ...
    ]; }


> If it's ok to remove pump.io, then I will do it. We can always readd it
> later.

I'm pretty sure it's OK to remove pump.io. I can make the PR and add
something to the release notes about it.

Cheers,

Rodney


> On Sun, Sep 11, 2016 at 2:00 PM, Rodney Lorrimar <rodney at rodney.id.au>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello List and Sander,
>>
>> It's nice to see the all good work done to keep up with the node.js
>> enchilada. I have a few questions about what this means for packages in
>> the nixpkgs collection.
>>
>> 1. Should pkgs/top-level/node-packages.{nix,json} be removed now?
>>
>> 2. Because I would like to update bower2nix from 3.0.1 -> 3.1.0, I run
>>    pkgs/development/node-packages/generate.sh.
>>
>>    (I noticed that this script could include the special nix-shell
>>    shebang to ensure node2nix is available when running the script).
>>
>>    Is it possible/desirable to limit version changes to just bower2nix
>>    and maybe its direct dependencies -- to minimize possible disruption
>>    to other nodePackages. This whole topic is a can of worms of course.
>>
>> 3. I "maintain" another node.js package -- pump.io -- which I'm unsure
>>    what to do with. I was probably too eager to PR this into the nixpkgs
>>    collection in the first place.
>>
>>    It recently had a 1.0.0 release which contains security-relevant
>>    fixes.
>>
>>    If I update to 1.0.0 it means dumping another 112K of fluff into our
>>    git repo. This might be OK if it were for a decent language's package
>>    system, or if the software had lots of users.
>>
>>    I think the best course of action is to remove the pump.io module and
>>    package from the main nixpkgs collection. Then maybe put it back when
>>    it's possible to generate derivations directly from a shrinkwrap.json.
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Rodney
>>