The holy grail of nixpkgs: version ranges

8 points by diktomat

fzakaria

You can play with it live: https://fzakaria.github.io/grail/

juuso

Wanted to leave a comment saying thanks for all these posts recently! I've enjoyed them quite much. I must say, I'm also rather jealous how productive your writing seems to be. :)
- fzakaria
  
  Thank you.
  
  It's a lifetime (long backlog) of pent up designs and aspirations that I have never had the chance to fully finish or chase but AI has made it possible so for that I am thankful -- despite the negative downsides that seem to be well discussed here.
winter
Cool stuff.

A few idle thoughts:
1. The current API you have for this only acts upon a set of exact versions, right? It doesn't magically have semver support, only this does, yeah?
2. How does this handle versions that aren't quite semver, e.g. 0-unstable-xxx -- are those possible to select at all, does the grammar even support it (e.g. a raw string) as a version?
3. It wouldn't be too hard to implement something like "prefer the latest/earliest channel versions for a given solve," or even "require a channel revision {after,before} X" for cases where you know you want e.g. a bug fixed?
Also: you may want to make it clearer that the glibc fact stuff isn't actually implemented yet (besides the Python script to extract them), it was made out to be the opposite in the post, at least to me.
- fzakaria
  The new tool has a closed query language for semver. Try it out here: https://fzakaria.github.io/grail/ Here is a sample query: https://fzakaria.github.io/grail/?q=python3%40%3E%3D3.10+%5Eopenssl%401.1.*
  
  (The website gives a primer on the sigils for the language)
  
  It uses a re-implementation of compareVersions (https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.28/language/builtins#builtins-compareVersions)
  
  That builtin splits any string into digit/letter components.
  
  Latest channel: yes, that is already the default behavior.
  
  If you check the site I added support for --one <attr> which does a simpler version of the glibc. It lets you consolidate to single versions across the pins. The next steps for glibc would be to support the version ranges.