Skip packages that requireFile by default

[delroth]

I'm using nix-review on a PR that causes a fair amount of transitive rebuilds (~1500). A few of these have been failing because they rely on source files that can't be automatically fetched.

Could nix-review somehow ignore by default packages that are set as not buildable on Hydra? This seems like a useful heuristic for "things that can be built unattended with no human action".

[Mic92]

I actually consider that as a feature, that nix-review tries to build all packages. From the logs it should become clear why certain packages have been failed. Since you can still test the non-failed once, I don't see any degradation in usability of the tool.

[delroth]

I'm not familiar with the codebase -- would it be feasible to have a flag to control this? I would much rather not have noise caused by issues unrelated to my change.

[Mic92]

It is not so trivial to implement that.

[superherointj]

I have same wish: to hide requireFile packages from results.

But I don't know what the proper solution is.

• I thought hydraPlatforms = []; would skip builds for nixpkgs-review, but I could not confirm that behavior.
  • skip builds on manual download for several packages NixOS/nixpkgs#192463

As the number of packages using requireFile increases it is getting worse.

In worst case, couldn't we manually compile a list of packages having requireFile for skipping?

[superherointj]

It is not so trivial to implement that.

What about having a requireFile blacklist of packages? I wouldn't mind keeping it updated. :-)

[superherointj]

Would be possible to check for a flag like, meta.manualDownload = true;?