Come up with better names

[rvl]

It's time to talk about the names.

nix-tools gives no indication that the tools are for Haskell Cabal and Stack, nor that they are only useful with haskell.nix.

Haskell.nix is a bit too similar to the auto-generated repos hackage.nix and stackage.nix. But Haskell.nix is more important than these repos.

[angerman]

Thanks for bringing this up @rvl! Yes naming has been a sore point. I've started to emphasise haskell.nix more over nix-tools. Specifically because nix-tools only does the translation and haskell.nix is the real haskell nix infrastructure.

I'm quite happy with the convention of .nix suffix for projects that consist of mostly nix files.

My preference would be

• focus on haskell.nix
• keep hackage.nix and stackage.nix
• find a better name for nix-tools.

[angerman]

We also have iohk-nix, which uses haskell.nix as building blocks to build our high level interface. @nomeata has been running into this a bit, and is probably not too happy about the cargo-culting.

I see this as three layers. (hackage.nix and stackage.nix being just auxiliary)

Layer	Name	Description
3	iohk-nix	High level tooling built ontop of haskell.nix with the focus on ease of use for common use cases.
2	haskell.nix	Improved (component level) build infrastructure for haskell packages with nix
1	nix-tools	low level translation utilities to translate (haskell) package databases/solutions/descriptions into nix

Where are the exact boundaries? If we add ghc's into this, they would be in haskell.nix? Shouldn't all our patches and cross compilation logic be then in haskell.nix as well? Or should we keep it leaner?

[nomeata]

Let me add a few pairs of cents:

If we add ghc's into this, they would be in haskell.nix?

I would assume so. Distinguishing ghc from Haskell libraries is hardly worth the bother, and ghc ships with many of them.

Shouldn't all our patches and cross compilation logic be then in haskell.nix as well?

As long as they are general purpose, i.e. not particularly tied to IOHK, yes. Since haskell.nix is, in a way, a replacement for parts of nixpkgs, and nixpkgs supports cross-compilation and has patches for that, it follows that haskell.nix is the right place.

If you want to keep haskell.nix to be purely the infrastructure (which makes sense), then maybe have a repository haskell.nix-patches that provides a pkgs-extras module (or even multiple ones), that users can opt-into. This would, in fact, be a nice separation of concerns.

nix-tools

Yes, very confusing that there is no haskell in the name. It would have helped me if that were called nix-haskell-tools or, even better haskell.nix-tools, since it is tied to haskell.nix (and not Haskell and nix in general).

iohk-nix

If it is “high-level tooling for convenience”, then it should definitely not have patches, because if the patches live there it means you can’t achieve the same result with less convenience without it, which means it is not “high-level tooling”.

Maybe haskell.nix-simple? It isn’t really iohk-specific, and having iohk in the same is confusing (I didn’t look at it because I thought it is local and specific code in there.)

hackage.nix and stackage.nix

I agreed with @rvl that the similarity to haskell.nix is confusing. Maybe haskell.nix-hackage and haskell.nix-stackage?

So maybe have these repositories?

• haskell.nix-tools
• haskell.nix
• haskell.nix-hackage
• haskell.nix-stackage
• haskell.nix-patches
• haskell.nix-simple

[angerman]

I've just opened irc://irc.freenode.net/#haskell.nix

[michaelpj]

Suggestion for nix-tools: haskell-builds-to-nix. Maybe haskell-builds.nix?

[angerman]

@michaelpj, I actually like haskell.nix-tools as suggested by @nomeata, any specific reason you don't like that one?

[michaelpj]

I just find "nix-tools" very non-specific even when it's scoped to Haskell. Hence the suggestion to at least say that it does something to do with build tools.

[nomeata]

The scoping is (haskell.nix)-tools :-)

[michaelpj]

Years of URLs have taught me that the precedence is the opposite way around :)

[angerman]

@michaelpj so you'd prefer haskell.nix/tools or tools.haskell.nix? nix-tools will essentially contain all the tools related to haskell.nix. If we fix build in there somehow, we will need yet another repository once we have non-build tools and the question becomes, what is a buildtool where are the boundaries?