[Bioc-devel] How can I maintain a stable list of source urls

[Mike Smith]

I was talking with another nix user a while back about this problem, and I
don't think there's a good solution at the moment.

One thing that strikes me is that when release packages get updated the old
versions get put in an archive and the source tarball remains available
e.g.
https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.10/bioc/src/contrib/Archive/biomaRt/
Currently
this archive is only created if a package is updated during the release
cycle.  Would it be sufficient for all packages to get an archive URL as
default?  Then if they aren't updated during a release cycle that URL is
fine, and if there are updates you get a new link to the new package source.

Something I'm not clear about is when you say this could be affected by
"changes inside the repo that affect the hash output".  AFAIK a new tarball
will only propagate to the download page if the version number has been
bumped, and so a new link will be generated.  I'm not sure how it's
possible to get a tarball with the same name but a different hash.

On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 at 23:03, Tim Sears <tim using timsears.com> wrote:

> Hi
> I am working to make bioconductor packages available through the nix
> package manager (https://nixos.org/). Currently nixpkgs points to a source
> url on one of the bioconductor mirrors. nixpkgs tracks the url and a sha256
> hash of the unpacked source link. Unfortunately the links themselves often
> disappear as the packages get updated either due to a version number change
> or changes inside the repo that affect the hash output. This breaks
> corresponding nix package. This happens even for stable bioconductor
> versions like 3.10. nixpkgs aims for reproducible builds, which means when
> things change, the url should reflect the change too and the contents
> behich old urls should be preserved long enough to manage the  change. Do
> you have any suggestions short of rebuilding a bioconductor mirror with
> immutable urls?
>
> Thanks,
> TIm
>
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