Re:NixOS 18.03 Released
by vertex-four on Monday April 09, 2018 @01:51PM
(#16795228)
> Consequently, couldn't nix's upgrading routines be modified to call out to pip/cargo/whatever to upgrade things best upgraded by pip/cargo/whatever?
No. pip/cargo/etc are nondeterministic. Nix packages should not be. Where they are, things often break in bizarre ways.
In order to access the Internet, a Nix package must declare the hash of its output - given that pip can produce different output from run to run (it contains a constraint solver which depends on the versions available in the external package repository) this is impossible.
I'm curious why not.
Aren't pip/cargo/whatever suitable for long-term use?
Consequently, couldn't nix's upgrading routines be modified to call out to pip/cargo/whatever to upgrade things best upgraded by pip/cargo/whatever?
I guess what I want to know is whether the architecture or the philosophy of nix interferes with nix's being modified in the way I just described. (Maybe it is just that nobody's gotten around to doing the implementation work.)