[Nix-dev] Repo for incomplete/unmaintained work

[Bjørn Forsman]

On 5 April 2014 21:46, Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Currently we have quite a lot of unmaintained, broken, or work-in
> progress components in nixpkgs. It would be great if we could get to the
> point where everything in nixpkgs was expected to work and be
> maintained, but part of that I think is having a place for this other
> work that isn't quite up to scratch but still may be valuable can live
> (it could also include experimental coding styles, proprietary services,
> etc.).
>
> Thoughts on the idea? Any idea for a name for the repo? Eelco, would you
> be able to make the repo if you think this is a good approach?

While I of course want to improve the quality of nixpkgs, I don't
think a separate repo is a good idea. I don't think it will improve
the situation.

Btw, do you mean that we'd create an (even more) "unstable" fork of
nixpkgs, or a brand new repo where *just* nix package expressions
would live (no build-support, stdenv etc.)?

Stuff are broken because 1) it was never finished in the first place
or 2) it has been unmaintained for so long that the surroundings has
changed from underneath it.

A separate repo will only fix the first issue, it cannot possibly fix
the second. And IMHO the first issue is solved by using git already:
PRs, feature branches in official repo that are built in Hydra.

I think marking packages as "broken" and having "allowUnfree"
configuration option is the best solution. And we already have that
:-)

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman