[Nix-dev] Auto-generated expressions for applications

[Marc Weber]

Let met try to sum up what I remember:

- There 3+ solutions to update "sources" documented on the wiki
  somewhere - ideas from comparing versions with other distributions up
  to adding scrapers getting latest version from web sites if I recall
  correctly

- Putting automatically generated code into nixpkgs doesn't solve all
  issues, for corner cases you have to duplicate dependencies using
  different version constraints.

  -> overhead

- Its not always quite clear how stable the user wants to be
  (gimp/inskscape) case, master sometimes has new features.

  So which versions to support ?

- Whatever we do, we don't solve anything for other distros (which
  suffer the same problem), unless we switch point of view:

  The solution would be a cross platform cross language dependency
  management system allowing to declare dependencies in a file so that
  you can even install from gihtub automatically.

  systemPackages = [ (fromGithub "user/package" "HEAD") ] # sort rest out on your own, thanks

package A could be working, package B could be working, but [A B] in the
same environment not (because they both depend on executable C)

After all we want nixpkgs to be at least stable enough to have broken
packages marked as broken and expect everything else to at least
compile/install.

Which are the best short/middle/long term solutions ?

Marc Weber