Packaging non-redist single-link stuff

Development Nixpkgs Architecture
1

Hi there. I’ve been scratching my head for a while on how to package Boosteroid client.

It is most probably non-redistributable (as the license is unstated anywhere), it has one link to download the latest version and sometimes it updates four times a day.

It also doesn’t work if it’s not on the latest version.

So yeah, quite a set of constraints for Nixpkgs.

I wrote a wrapper which patches downloaded update after the current version of client downloaded it, and launches it instead of an old version, however that doesn’t solve the problem of downloading the binary in the first place.

I think I will be moving towards filtering everything out of .deb, except desktop files and icons and hasingi this; renaming it to «boosteroid-installer» and just rolling with that instead.
Or actually making my own icon so not to require unfree license.

However I wanted to ask forum if there is another way to do that I am totally missing. Any thoughts?

2

PR: boosteroid: init at 1.8.4 by cab404 · Pull Request #300361 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

3

If upstream updates very frequently and always requires the latest, then it seems like the best thing to do is to package it in an external flake/repo. That’s why I haven’t bothered trying to upstream my nix-foundryvtt flake. If I did get it into nixpkgs, I probably couldn’t support overriding arbitrary versions like I do now.

4

Fair, however giving up would probably mean that there is a set of packages Nixpkgs cannot package by design.

Also, I don’t think moving it to flake solve any of the stated problems. It will help avoid backporting, but that’s a separate issue.