Comment by prepend
5 years ago
This is why we can’t have nice things.
The project could have pinned the version and downloaded from pypi rather than repackaging.
This isn’t a situation of “can do” it was “is it nice to do.”
And the author mentioned that he’s changing the license to prevent it so it no longer becomes possible legally.
I typically don’t like authors demanding stuff outside their license, but this started as a simple technical/community request to not do something dumb and escalated.
> The project could have pinned the version and downloaded from pypi rather than repackaging.
It couldn't, since Nix is a package manager and will only download things from its repository. It can't access the internet otherwise.
That is not quite right. NixOS can download files from the internet during build time for example to get the source code and you can even disable downloading things form the cache. It would be technically possible to download files at runtime but that does not align well with the reproducible goal and would also require some hacky patching.
It was asked if using PyPi as the source was acceptable in one of the PR comments: the author just said no.
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86... says why pinning and pulling from pypi wouldn't work
What you are proposing doesn’t work with nix packaging
And that is the point: a nix problem becomes his problem all of a sudden.
It's a packaging problem in general, and packaging is pretty important.
And "becomes his problem" isn't right either. If he wasn't upset by normal packaging then there wouldn't be a problem at all.