Importing nix-universal-prefetch into nix-community?

[tomfitzhenry]

nix-universal-prefetch is a tool used by a few update scripts in nixpkgs. nix-universal-prefetch was recently removed in NixOS/nixpkgs#321436 , since its upstream repo has been removed from Github. This broke a few update scripts:

• discourse update script broken NixOS/nixpkgs#321499
• gitlab update script broken NixOS/nixpkgs#321491
• electron update script broken NixOS/nixpkgs#321490

The source of this repo still exists: https://github.com/Marcus-Arcadius/nix-universal-prefetch .

To fix this update scripts, should we import https://github.com/Marcus-Arcadius/nix-universal-prefetch into nix-community, and re-package this for nixpkgs?

[Mic92]

@tomfitzhenry do you want to take over maintenance?

[JohnRTitor]

The issue is not with ownership but rather commitment to maintenance, it is used in update script for apps like Electron, which obviously carries weight.

[tomfitzhenry]

Practically I'm not in a good spot to do that maintenance, as I have no relationship with discourse/gitlab/electron.

[tomfitzhenry]

I see @Mic92 worked on NixOS/nixpkgs#322179 to replace a use of nix-universal-prefetch with nix-update.

This is far more preferable. Let's leave it with the discourse/gitlab/electron maintainers to ensure that migration from unsupported tool to supported tool.

[Mic92]

We can also use https://github.com/nix-community/nurl as an alternative.