[Nix-dev] Auto-generated expressions for applications

[Wout Mertens]

This actually ties into my question about nodePackages. It seems to me that
for these large packaging systems, we should have separate repos that
update from their source, and you can then include them into your nixpkgs
configuration.

Only packages that are useful by themselves should get a derivation in
nixpkgs, the rest would be in these add-on repos. For nodejs, that would be
e.g. yarn.

No idea how to accomplish this though.

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 9:31 AM Freddy Rietdijk <freddyrietdijk at fridh.nl>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> At several places in Nixpkgs we use auto-generated data, mostly for the
> larger package sets like Haskell. Sometimes we also use auto-generated sets
> for applications that may need different versions than are offered in the
> main package sets. In the past months several issues/PR's have been opened
> to add rather large Python applications to Nixpkgs, generated using
> `pypi2nix`.
>
> Using such tool to generate the expressions has some very big advantages.
> However, there's also a disadvantage. The expressions shouldn't only be
> updated when there's a new release of the application, but also whenever
> there's security updates in any of its generated dependencies, which the
> application maintainer now has to keep track of. Therefore, I find it quite
> a risk to have separate package sets. At the same time, we'll also likely
> run behind in the main package sets every once in a while.
>
> What do you think of this issue? Any suggestions how we can improve this?
> Maybe we could have a server/bot that runs update scripts and opens a PR
> whenever there's an actual diff?
>
> Freddy
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