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

[David Izquierdo]

Couldn't this become a kind of dependency hell? I remember from Gentoo 
that having dependencies across overlays is not a fun problem to solve. 
However, Exherbo mostly solved this by having overlays be analogous to 
packages, they become a kind of dependency that must be explicitly 
user-solved before continuing. In the default ebuild tree they have 
indexes of every package in each registered overlay.


I think this should only be done if there's nothing anywhere else 
depending on a derivation from this overlay-to-be.


On 11/03/17 09:12, Wout Mertens wrote:
> 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 Specifically, nodePackages is always out of date, and it would be nice if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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