Call for Discussion: why and how much should we care about the `.override` interfaces? (Part I: Duckstation and PCSX2)

Development Nixpkgs Architecture
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From time to time I refactor the expressions in Nixpkgs, whether mine or someone else’s.

The reasons are multiple:

  • cosmetic formatting

  • finalAttrs design pattern

  • removing or banishing bad language constructs such as rec and nested with, according to the Best Practices

  • migration to by-name hierarchy

  • Technical decisions based on intuition more than a technical and weary examination

In this last category, recently I am unifying the .override interface (a.k.a. the input set) of some packages.
I have started with bochs, and it is working fine (except unrelated, typical errors on Darwin), but two specific cases were a bit polemic.

For now I will leave the other case to a new post. In this I will talk about the Duckstation update PR

Triggered by an update PR by SuperSamus, I migrated and refactored the expression that builds Duckstation. In order to do it, I modified the expression to use callPackage instead of qt6.callPackage as before.

Further, the new Duckstation release required the application of a patch, not in the Duckstation code but rather into a dependency, namely shaderc.

That being said, originally SuperSamus built the patched shaderc inside the Duckstation expression. Basically, the caller provides a pristine shaderc, so that the expression patches and builds shaderc before building duckstation itself.

Instead of this approach, I preferred to keep the expression “agnostic” about its inputs: duckstation receives whatever shaderc is provided, while the caller (at top-level) provides the correctly patched shaderc.

Supersandro2000 raised two objections about this.

  • The first was about callPackage VS qt6.callPackage.
  • The second was about patched shaderc inside VS outside the expression.

Summarizing my decisions, I chose callPackage in order to make the expression compatible with by-name hierarchy, and I patched shaderc outside duckstation because it keeps the override interface cleaner and predictable.

This post is too long already, I will vent my full opinion tomorrow. For now I expect I have provided a clear picture about what is going on.

Calling @SuperSamus @Sandro as participants of the conversation.

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