[Nix-dev] Move NodeJS to separate overlay repository?

[Wout Mertens]

Hi all,

now that we got these wonderful overlays as a Chrismas gift (
http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2016-December/022386.html), I
was wondering if we can move some things out of nixpkgs into their own
repos.

There are a few package groups that I believe are not used in NixOS core
(boot, containers, ...) and are not updated as much as they could be. Node,
Haskell, others?

Specifically, nodePackages is always out of date, and it would be nice if
there could be a repository or maybe just a local process that updates them
separately and adds a lot more builds.

Furthermore, building node packages from scratch is ok, because that's what
npm does anyway. So any caching offered by Hydra is a bonus, not a
necessity.

For example, maybe the overlay could be auto-generated every hour from npm?
And then some service fetches it to /etc/nixos/overlays/nodePackages?

Does this seem like a fair assessment? What should be done to achieve this?

Wout.
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