lix/doc/manual/bugs.xml

<appendix xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
          xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">

<title>Bugs / To-Do</title>


<itemizedlist>

<listitem><para>The man-pages generated from the DocBook documentation
are ugly.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>Generations properly form a tree.  E.g., if after
switching to generation 39, we perform an installation action, a
generation 43 is created which is a descendant of 39, not 42.  So a
rollback from 43 ought to go back to 39.  This is not currently
implemented; generations form a linear sequence.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para><emphasis>Build management.</emphasis> In principle it
is already possible to do build management using Nix (by writing
builders that perform appropriate build steps), but the Nix expression
language is not yet powerful enough to make this pleasant (?).  The
language should be extended with features from the <link
xlink:href='http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco/maak/'>Maak build
manager</link>.  Another interesting idea is to write a
<command>make</command> implementation that uses Nix as a back-end to
support <link
xlink:href='http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq.html#legacy'>legacy</link>
build files.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>For security, <command>nix-push</command> manifests
should be digitally signed, and <command>nix-pull</command> should
verify the signatures.  The actual NAR archives in the cache do not
need to be signed, since the manifest contains cryptographic hashes of
these files (and <filename>fetchurl.nix</filename> checks
them).</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>It would be useful to have an option in
<command>nix-env --delete-generations</command> to remove non-current
generations older than a certain age.</para></listitem>

<listitem><para>There should be a flexible way to change the user
environment builder.  Currently, you have to replace
<filename><replaceable>prefix</replaceable>/share/nix/corepkgs/buildenv/builder.pl</filename>,
which is hard-coded into <command>nix-env</command>.  Also, the
default builder should be more powerful.  For instance, there should
be some way to specify priorities to resolve
collisions.</para></listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</appendix>