[Nix-dev] Flattening pkgs tree in nixpkgs/pkgs

[Jakob Gillich]

Somehow Fastmail didn't actually replace the link, but only the link text :(. I wanted to link to: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-categories.html[1]


On Fri, Jan 8, 2016, at 03:48 AM, Jakob Gillich wrote:
> I agree that the current folder structure is a mess. There is a severe
> lack of structure, often there are further category-folders in a
> folder with packages (like misc/, misc/themes/).
>
> FreeBSD has categories at the root level, everything below are
> packages:
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/makefile-categories.html[2]
>
> Maybe this model could work for us, too?
>
> They also have virtual categories for things like gnome; if we
> implement something similar, that would allow maintainers of larger
> package sets (@lethalman) to work as usual.
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016, at 01:04 AM, Tomasz Czyż wrote:
>> After playing for a while with a nixpkgs repo I have impression that
>> categories/directories are just waste of time.
>>
>> * Have to be maintained
>> * Harder to find things
>> * Lack of any package manager which tells about it
>>
>> Each time I want to find a package name I do
>> * find -name '*name*' or use github search to locate files in repo.
>>
>> From maintaining perspective:
>>
>> (for x in `ls`; do n=$(ls $x|wc -l);echo "$n - $x";done)|sort -n
>> 1 - backup 2 - inferno 2 - search 3 - gis 4 - display-managers 10
>> - altcoins 11 - science 11 - taxes 20 - virtualization 25 - kde-apps-
>> 15.12 27 - office 41 - version-management 41 - window-managers 42
>> - networking 59 - video 60 - editors 85 - graphics 186 - audio
>> 224 - misc
>>
>> Do you see that? It's hard to define all those categories levels,
>> some of directories have subdirectories (like applications) other not
>> (servers). It's hard to follow. Most people know the name of the
>> software, if not, they probably use google to find it, not using
>> categories.
>>
>> Let's make the layout more clear, more accessible and easy to follow.
>>
>> What do you think about moving all packages into flat namespace?
>>
>> Let's say you have
>>
>> pkgs/package1/default.nix pkgs/package2/default.nix
>>
>> or even better:
>>
>> pkgs/my-package.nix pkgs/gcc.nix pkgs/gcc-5.0.nix
>>
>> then, you can autogenerate top-level.pkgs
>>
>> I'm happy to help implementing that.
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>
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Links:

  1. https://freshports.org/categories.php
  2. https://freshports.org/categories.php
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