Brainstorming for RFC: pname and version

Hello, people!

There is occurring a lengthy discussion about how Nixpkgs should implement the parameters pname and version in Nixpkgs.

After lengthy discussions, I think we need to centralize all of them here. After this we can write a RFC.

Related links:

#68518
#100833
#110442

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/clarification-on-package-names-and-versions/

10 Likes

Something that I feel muddled #100833 is the number of things we call “unstable”:

  • packages that don’t have releases as we’re used to, thus we package whatever commit is in master at the time, like some Linux drivers¹ (e.g. rtl8192eu);
  • packages that do have versioned releases but the latest release is not usable by us, so we (temporarily) package an unreleased version; ipfs-cluster is a good example;
  • derivations tracking non-stable builds, like nixUnstable or zfsUnstable.

A good start would be to disambiguate these concepts, perhaps giving them new names.

¹: Incidentally, we should also decide if and how to include the kernel version in the pname-version combo; it’s been a while but I recall seeing a few variants.

4 Likes
  • packages that do have versioned releases but the latest release is not usable by us, so we (temporarily) package an unreleased version; ipfs-cluster is a good example;

In this case my suggestion is to use ${latestReleasedVersion}-unstable-${date of the latest usable release in yyyy-mm-dd format}.

As an example I am packaging cardboard, version 0.0.0-unstable-2021-01-21.

packages that don’t have releases as we’re used to, thus we package whatever commit is in master at the time, like some Linux drivers¹ (e.g. rtl8192eu );

They are part of the Linux kernel? Or they are maintained outside the tree? Both cases need to be cogitated.

3 Likes

Semver holds pre-release specs (direct link above) that can be useful, even if not the full semver spec is used in a particular case.

2 Likes

I support @AndersonTorres proposal.

The many times discussed problem with SemVer pre-releases is that we need to guess the next version. And I think Nix imperative upgrade logic works better with @AndersonTorres proposal.

1 Like

Also, upstream may use the semvel pre-release identifiers in future releases.

3 Likes

SemVer suggests using dots for everything, but I think date is better.

1 Like

SemVer suggests using dots for everything, but I think date is better.

Presumably if semantics is «we have no idea», not being too in line with usual SemVer practices (even if within spec) is a plus anyway?

4 Likes

Also, upstream may use the semvel pre-release identifiers in future releases.

For us it does not matter so much. If upstream uses, say, calVer, we just copy it. There is no ambiguity in things like fancypiler-2010-01-15-unstable-2020-12-15.


The main concern here is: parseDrvName splits the name in pname+version form, where pname goes till the first non-numerical character. According to the BDFL Eelco Dolstra, parseDrvName is not bugged :slight_smile:
Therefore, we should follow it, not circumvent it.


About the kernel modules specifically, I would suggest to add to the end of the version string something like -linux-${kernelVersion}. Something like netcon-3.3.5-unstable-2021-12-05-linux-4.8.8.6.

oops

1 Like

Yes. Semver is just a useful concept, not a set-in-stone standard.

The main concern is how to make something amenable to ASCII-betical upgrades without look garbled.

1 Like

The iso basic format suggests YYYYMMDD and spares on potentially semantic hyphens.

In a semver inspired naming scheme that would be:

whatever-<YYYYMMDD>+<buildhash>

Whatever can be anything, the last hyphen separates “our” pre-release marker, the following + sign separates the build.

2 Likes

The iso basic format suggests YYYYMMDD and spares on potentially semantic hyphens.

I find 8 digits with no separators a suboptimal representation from readability point of view.

6 Likes

After elocubrating a bit, I am convinced of this:

  • Released version: pname is the project name, and version is the version as released by the upstream project.
    Examples:
  • Unreleased branches:

    • If there is a released version but, for any reason, a more up-to-date source code is desired, the version is to be something like ${latest released version}-unstable-${date of the extracted source, YYYY-MM-DD format}
    • If there is no initial release at all, set it to 0.0.0.
  • Linux kernel modules: append linux-${kernel version} to version.

1 Like

Stripping initial v or r if the upstream prefixes all the versions with it, so that parseDrvName does not get confused.

1 Like

I like where this is going.

Potentially +[k=v] could be used for the metadata separator. Eg:

> builtins.parseDrvName "hello-2.10+unstable=2021-04-05"
{ name = "hello"; version = "2.10+unstable=2021-04-05"; }
3 Likes

Or in general things that does not change the versioning, such as ver25.15.

It can be useful for kernel modules: netcon-2.5+unstable=2020-12-12+linux=4.15.10. Looks promising.

But we need to be careful not to over-engineering this.

1 Like

It is similar to derivations tracking old releases - think like GTK2 and GTK3.

Or even better, we can catch an old example: Python2 and Python3. Both Pythons came from the same source tree (biblical pun not intended), but they were released as separate projects.

We can think the same way about nixUnstable and regular nix. They are different projects from the same source tree.

1 Like

@AndersonTorres Here’s a recent one from IRC, not that it needs to be on the list: #nixos-dev on 2021-04-25 — irc logs;


A few thoughts (ignoring pragmatics/compatibility):

  1. The existence of multiple package variants (and difficulty discriminating between them with nix-env) suggests there’s a missing (project?) abstraction. It could, for example, clarify what variants exist and either how to compose their names, or how to parse the names to distinguish them.

  2. I guess there’s a bit of an audience conflict between the documentation here?

    • It’s fine/good for there to be maintainer-focused documentation that is very explicit/detailed on what all depends on the name/version and how to formulate them without breaking stuff.
    • I’m very skeptical that any documentation satisfying the above can be simultaneously appropriate for first-time packagers.
  3. For the benefit of first-time packagers, it may be fruitful to treat each extra sentence/bullet needed to describe a field as a smell that it should be decomposed into simple decisions that:

    • have unambiguous names
    • do not share/overload semantics
    • are easy to get right without ecosystem knowledge
    • are automatically checked/constrained and recomposed to satisfy the ecosystem’s needs/imperatives
2 Likes

About the issue of newcomers, I don’t think they will be overly affected. Usually a new packager wants to insert a single package with an obvious scheming. A newcomer will hardly try to package something like VirtualBox with its modules from master branch.

On the other hand, the issues pointed out are legitimate.

1 Like

I think my point wrt newcomers is that, even if the odds they’ll have something crazy to package are minimal, they still have to try and understand what the packaging guide has to say about names and versions.

That said, the first thing I wanted to package was submitted in bashup-events: init at it's-complicated by abathur · Pull Request #107182 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub, though I ultimately ended up waiting until I had resholve in before doing so, and I definitely had to spend some time puzzling over the docs and asking in IRC.

2 Likes