Comment by ris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ris | Hacker News Reader

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> 1) Nixpkgs could be broken up into several package sets for better scalability. Eg, haskelPackages and pythonPackages could be broken out into separate repositories.

While this could happen, it's exactly what I hope won't happen, because in my opinion the idea that haskell or python packages are fundamentally different and can live in their own world is a fallacy. I spend quite a bit of my time fixing python packages on nixpkgs master and the number of times the fix actually involves making a tweak to a non-python library means I would forever have to be playing games synchronizing repositories. Also, gone would be the ability to make atomic changes across these boundaries.

Viva la monorepo.

Nixpkgs as a monorepo is great if all you want to do is install FOSS packages on your NixOS linux box. That's probably the biggest use case for nixpkgs, so it's important, but it's not the only use case.

If pythonPackages were broken out into a separate repository (which I'm not advocating, it was just an example), you'd fix a python package by importing the upstream library from the nixpkgs flake, tweaking it locally and then using the local version as buildInput to the python package. Sometimes it would make sense to submit the fix upstream, and sometimes not.

At the same time, we really have run into scaling issues—automatically importing all of Stackage into nixpkgs was killing us for a while there.

Regardless of whether nixpkgs remains a monorepo or not, I think 2) is actually the most exciting thing about the flakes proposal. Package authors being unable to supply nix packaging within the package repository is a big impediment to the adoption of nix.

> Viva la monorepo.

Absolutely. Look at edolstra take on this though https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49#discussion_r305450668

This is why I'm scared of this change.

Me too. I think (hope) that the NixOS community won't end up doing all the work it would take to break up the existing monorepo; instead they'll just add a few small additional repos.

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