Rename inotifyTools to inotify-tools

[Havvy]

The pakage inotifyTools should be called inotify-tools, no?

[edolstra]

Yes.

[vcunat]

A mass rename of camelCase attributes to dashed-style?

We don't have a nixpkgs equivalent of nixos/modules/rename.nix, do we?

[edolstra]

At the bottom of all-packages.nix there is a section for aliases:

  # Attributes for backward compatibility.
  adobeReader = adobe-reader;
  ...

[vcunat]

Yes, but it would be nice if using deprecated aliases would print a warning during evaluation.

[copumpkin]

{
  adobeReader = builtins.trace "get yo act together" adobe-reader;
}

[vcunat]

Hmm, perhaps, we can save some typing by:

{
   # usual package definitions
  foo = bar;
} // lib.mapAttrs (name: builtins.trace "Warning: using a deprecated attribute '${name}'") {
  # Attributes for backward compatibility.
  adobeReader = adobe-reader;
  # ...
}

I tested this, and it looks good IMHO. Any reason not to have this change, even in 15.09?

[copumpkin]

I like it!

[Havvy]

The warning should be more specific.

Warning: using a deprecated attribute '${name}'. Camel-case attributes have been switched out with dashes. For example, instead of using 'inotifyTools', use 'inotify-tools'

Note: If there's a more popular (and open) package, use that for the example than just inotifyTools.

[vcunat]

@Havvy: the deprecation of a name might be for different reasons, such us upstream renaming (cool-old-term -> cool-retro-term). We would have to split away this specific naming-unification group, which does make most of all deprecations ATM.

[vcunat]

Pushed adding the warnings. I'm not sure if the mass-replace should be in 15.09. It would perhaps be better to have more consistent naming between master and 15.09, as we could have some cherry-picking problems later.

[Mayeu]

Hello, I'm commenting here since I just saw those warning messages in my shell.

trace: Warning: using a deprecated attribute 'clangAnalyzer'. CamelCase and under_scores are replaced by dashed-names to match the nix-env names better.
trace: Warning: using a deprecated attribute 'cool-old-term'

From a user perspective, I have no clue what to do to deal with those messages/packages:

• Should I reinstall the package manually?
• Will nix take care of everything by itself now or in the future?
• If I should manually change the package, how do I find the new package name? (for example in the case of 'cool-old-term', there is no info on why it is deprecated, and what is its new name)
• And if I have to reinstall should I remove the old one?

I think there should be some kind of direction in this message, either pointing to an how-to URL, or even giving command to copy/paste to fix the issue.

And by the way, I actually have no clue of what would be the clean way to switch to the new package name ^^

[vcunat]

@Mayeu: if you are using the identifier cool-old-term (for example), how did you find out about it in the first place? Surely not by guessing. Most of the deprecated names are just aliases – if you use the new names, nothing changes except that the warning will disappear.

The message could explain all that, and it could also print the new attribute path, with some refactoring, but there is a more serious problem: ATM it throws this trace for all deprecated attributes when doing nix-env -qa, see comments on 8e8e23d.

[vcunat]

@Mayeu: anyway, the warnings are reverted for now.

[Mayeu]

@vcunat Thank for your response. Some packages are the one that I explicitly installed, and as you said, I did not guess them out of luck. But other are just dependencies that I have no idea were installed. Thus questions ensue.

I really think NixOS is a great OS and is the right way of doing package management, and as a recent user I also see all the roughness it has right now. That's why I wanted to jump in to give some input from the «common user» point of view :)

[vcunat]

Feedback is welcome.

[vcunat]

For followup discussion see commit 8e8e23d.