I once tried https://gitorious.org/nixpkgs-python-overlay.
Like nixpkgs-overlay and hack-nix this uses a different approach: a) dump everything from pypi into a format readable by nix b) use a package description to assemble derivations on the fly. This is using a simple brute force solver, if two different package versions get "resolved" in the ruby/python case it will simply raise an error and stop, then you have to hardcode one. This could be done better. I didn't get far because the that time I noticed that a lot of python package had not proper dependency information which was readable outside of python (without running setup.py). Currently the dump I created is heavily outdated. Thus yes: There are alternative ways - and I think that its the future to provide mirrors of pypi - you can download piecewise(!) as needed. Because in the ruby case there are 40.000+ packages - and you don't want to download them all if you want to install 5 packages. You can get an idea about how it should have looked like here: http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2011-March/006021.html Yes - my implementation is just a "prototype" and could be horribly outdated. By the way: I think the perfect goal would be creating huge package databases, so that all software could be installed that way - but that would also be a lot of work - because each language has its own constraint. Eg for node its fine if you have A - B-1.0 `- C - B-2.0 Because A/C will both get a different view on B Marc Weber _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
