yaxg: Removed unstable from name

[neonfuz]

Motivation for this change

When I first wrote this package I didn't fully understand how versioning worked in nixos, and I didn't realize the -unstable would end up in the package name rather than the version string. I added unstable because there was no official version tag, however yaxg is actually stable, and hasn't had a change since 2018. This change simplifies installing yaxg in a nix environment from nix-env -i yaxg-unstable to just nix-env -i yaxg.

Things done

• Tested using sandboxing (nix.useSandbox on NixOS, or option sandbox in nix.conf on non-NixOS linux)
• Built on platform(s)
  • NixOS
  • macOS
  • other Linux distributions
• Tested via one or more NixOS test(s) if existing and applicable for the change (look inside nixos/tests)
• Tested compilation of all pkgs that depend on this change using nix-shell -p nixpkgs-review --run "nixpkgs-review wip"
• Tested execution of all binary files (usually in ./result/bin/)
• Determined the impact on package closure size (by running nix path-info -S before and after)
• Ensured that relevant documentation is up to date
• Fits CONTRIBUTING.md.

[mweinelt]

This change simplifies installing yaxg in a nix environment from nix-env -i yaxg-unstable to just nix-env -i yaxg.

Pretty sure that is already the case, since the -i flag expects a pkgname. The version is not part of that.

❯ nix-build -A yaxg-unstable
error: attribute 'yaxg-unstable' in selection path 'yaxg-unstable' not found
❯ nix-build -A yaxg
/nix/store/dfvybj89l9xn4vyvy8v3gmps3l89x8qc-yaxg-unstable-2018-05-03

I've seen the unstable prefix in the version attribute whenever there was no tagged release. So I'm not sure this change is actually necessary.

[neonfuz]

Pretty sure that is already the case

no it's not, nix-build's syntax is not consistent with nix-env:

$ nix-env -i yaxg
error: selector 'yaxg' matches no derivations

working commands:

$ nix-env -i yaxg-unstable
$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.yaxg

nix-env -i doesn't read the pname and search against it, instead it takes the full name and strips the version with something like /-[0-9-]*$/d.

nix-env -i yaxg is shorter than either of these, and doesn't give the feeling of installing unstable software. needing to append -unstable makes me as a user feel like I'm installing a beta version, like firefox-beta or something-git. To me, the existence of the postfix -unstable implies that the software has an alternative stable version, is undergoing rapid changes, or is very new. None of these are true for yaxg anymore.

Anyways, I just remembered it's actually in the nixpkgs manual that you should add -unstable to the name of "non releases". It also says the version should always start with a number. So technically -unstable should be moved from the version to the name.
https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-package-naming

Considering yaxg really is stable, maybe I'll bug upstream to tag this as 1.0 or something.

[jtojnar]

nix-env without -A is not really recommended since it needs to scan the whole nixpkgs for package with matching name. We really need to remove it from docs. I would suggest adding alias npkge=nix-env -f '<nixpkgs>' or alias npkge=nix-env -f channel:nixpkgs-unstable and then using npkge -iA yaxg if you find the fully qualified command too long.

Yeah, where to put unstable in the name is point of contention since the name splitting is not a very good design, see the discussion in #88023 (comment).

[neonfuz]

Yeah I already made a little bash function that I use, but it's a bit more hacky: nixi() { nix-env -iA nixpkgs.$@; }. May adopt that one, thanks.

Anyways since it seems the rest of nixos uses -unstable in this way I'll close this issue. Maybe I'll bug upstream to make a tag if it's really necessary.