Reorganization of "altcoins"

[chris-martin]

It looks like the "altcoins" set originated as a set of Bitcoin derivations with slightly different parameters, but eventually started to contain a bunch of cryptocurrency-related things.

People (myself included) end up submitting patches like this one with a useless layer of indirection:

• pkgs/applications/altcoins/default.nix

  ethrun = callPackage ./ethrun.nix { };
  

• pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix

  ethrun = self.altcoins.ethrun;
  

Also the name is rather a misnomer. There are some cryptocurrency-related tools in here (or not in here yet but that belong grouped with these packages), not just the "coin" nodes themselves. And I believe some would vehemently disagree with the classification of Ethereum as an "altcoin".

So I propose we:

• Rename pkgs/applications/altcoins to pkgs/applications/cryptocurrency
• Move everything from pkgs/applications/altcoins/default.nix into pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix
• Move various packages into pkgs/applications/cryptocurrency:
  • pkgs/tools/misc/libbitcoin - includes the bx command-line tool for Bitcoin-related things
  • pkgs/applications/misc/qtbitcointrader - Bitcoin trading client
  • pkgs/tools/security/secp256k1 - technically isn't specifically cryptocurrency-related, but it's the elliptic curve popularized by Bitcoin and the library is maintained by bitcoin-core
  • pkgs/servers/trezord - daemon for using a Bitcoin hardware wallet
  • pkgs/applications/misc/vanitygen - a Bitcoin vanity address generator
  • pkgs/applications/misc/electrum - a Bitcoin wallet
  • pkgs/applications/misc/cgminer - a Bitcoin GPU miner

[matthewbauer]

Sounds pretty reasonable. We do have the related problem that all-packages.nix has gotten really huge. I don't know of a good solution to it but probably we'll need to split up in some way. Anyway, I don't think 10-20 extra lines is going to make anything much worse.

I do find the naming of some of the directories a little hard to remember. For instance games go in pkgs/games, but emulators go in pkgs/misc/emulators. Both emulators and games are almost always considered "applications" but they don't live in pkgs/applications even though we even have a directory names pkgs/applications/misc. Does anyone know of any standard for directory names in nixpkgs? I couldn't find anything.

[chris-martin]

@matthewbauer I also have thoughts on the larger organization problem, but I'm hoping to keep the scope of this issue more narrow :)

[MDeltaX]

I suggest renaming it to "blockchain" or "blockchains" instead of "cryptocurrency", since not every blockchain is used as a currency and I see no reason to differentiate currencies from non-currencies.

[chris-martin]

I can agree with that, yeah. The meaning of "blockchain" has gotten a bit overloaded but I think it's the word most people will associate with this category of software.

[mmahut]

Are there any updates on this issue, please?

[jb55]

ACK, I get triggered evertime I see altcoins.bitcoin or altcoins.clightning

we should just do away with the attrset entirly and just categorize it like everthing else in nixpkgs, in a specific folder like blockchains or databases?

[mmahut]

@jb55 +1 for blockchains, I guess that technology will only grow.