[Nix-dev] Nix(OS) on upcoming sprints/events

[Marc Weber]

Excerpts from Florian Friesdorf's message of Sun Feb 05 22:31:21 +0100 2012:
> It would be great to have your know-how about that! Would you be
> interested to help with another approach and join us for at least a
> couple of days?
I don't do python - and I don't think I'm coding much python soon.
Also I'm not sure its going to pay off because it looks like the
existing installation tools work pretty well - don't they?

> > Thus it looks to me that you will have to download the packages to
> > query the install scripts for dependency information.
> 
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyPiXmlRpc claims that this is available via
> pypi, but I have not tried to query that info yet.
I tried it with one or two packages finding that still dependencies were
missing. 

> However, I see a whitelist of packages we want to package, we download
> them, checksum, generate EGG_INFO and create an expression for each
> package version we want to include.
> What is needed for maintenance with your approach?
In theory almost none (but passing C dependencies).
A dump of PyPi is done by cron job. And dependencies should be found if
PyPi lists them.
If you have complicated dependency information such as
A depends on B (> 1.0)
C depends on B-1.0

and T(arget) depends on A and C you may have to force B having version
2.0

I can try to resurrect the overlay so that we can compare the effort it
takes to make packages work. So if you tell me which packages you're
interested in ...

Marc Weber