Nixpkgs has the concept of aliases, which are intended to be transitional; they get an added-on date attached to them and eventually they’re replaced with a throw, as far as I can tell. This is neat because these can be disabled if an automated process is looking through the list of all packages and doesn’t want duplicates.
There are also cases in all-packages.nix
where a particular package version is ‘aliased’ to a version-less name, like bestappever = bestappever9;
. These are less neat for automated processes because they can’t be disabled or filtered out. But they aren’t transitional in the same way that the things in aliases.nix
are.
Can we consider marking these somehow so that automated processes can filter them out? I’m imagining a new meta
or passthru
property, along with a lib.mkRedirect
function that would be used in all-packages.nix
to set it (and preserve everything else about the package). (I don’t know which, if either, of those namespaces would change the Nix derivation hash, which would be undesirable.)
Would this conflict with anything being planned for the new pkgs/by-name
organizational structure?