Fix the problem of forgotten runHook {pre,post}* calls

[roberth]

Project description

We advise to do

fooPhase = ''
  runHook preFoo

  put your commands here

  runHook postFoo

why not:

fooCommands = ''
  put your commands here
''

and have stdenv do the right thing?

This will save a lot of nagging and presumably a bunch of frustration.

These identifiers have not yet been used in Nixpkgs.

The only similarity is with buildCommand, singular, which is the variable backing the runCommand function. Its purpose is to avoid the phases and simply do a thing.

Metadata

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• source URL:
• license: mit, bsd, gpl2+ , ...
• platforms: unix, linux, darwin, ...

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/low-effort-and-high-impact-tasks/21095/7

[ncfavier]

Instead of introducing new attributes, could we make runHook X idempotent and always run pre/post hooks before and after phases, even if they're overriden?

I fear that having buildCommands will just lead to a different type of nagging ("remember to use buildCommands" instead of "remember to use runHooks").

[roberth]

So I guess the question is whether we want to break people's code or do a treewide? I'd favor the latter. We could deprecate the setting of *Phase in the long run.

[Artturin]

i stumbled upon a rfc related to this NixOS/rfcs#32

[roberth]

It doesn't seem to have been implemented; asking.

[ncfavier]

break people's code or do a treewide

I don't think my suggestion requires either? Unless you mean that running hooks that were previously not run could break things, but hooks are empty by default so this seems dubious