I support this PR. I have run into this problem and the error message would have helped me.

I think this sets a very weird precedent. Why not just package the beta?

Yeah, I think I agree with @srhb.

I think we’re in a special situation here, because it’s specifically a nix tool that people would expect for nix, but we don’t want to make any commitments to stability right now, nor any releases.
When we give it an error message, the user experience is much better.

I will not stand in your way if more people agree that this is fine, but I personally feel like it's essentially an in-tree advertisement. And what would you do if some random person decided to package lorri anyway?

And what would you do if some random person decided to package lorri anyway?

#60211

I think that message has a very confusing "we" -- "we" as in nixpkgs maintainers, or "we" as in lorri authors?

I'm sorry to harp on this, and maybe we should indeed special case this as you suggest, but in that case I'd like it to have at least been explicitly discussed, so it doesn't just look like preferential treatment of some company's project by virtue solely of them having nixpkgs maintainers on board. :)

Mostly “we” as @Profpatsch @grahamc and @shlevy, as people who want the freedom to quickly iterate on it while people seem to be interested in trying it out in the current state (which might change significantly over the next few weeks).

Thanks for clarifying.

Would adding a package named lorri-unstable (alpha/beta) be a solution? Or is there a technical reason lorri can't be in nixpkgs?

Then adding a hint when trying to install lorri wouldn't be such a weird precedent. I would be like a "did you mean..'" with some extra info about package state.

Would adding a package named lorri-unstable (alpha/beta) be a solution?

I don’t think that makes any sense. We’ll push lorri into nixpkgs once we think it’s stable enough, until then people can go to the project page, installing it is just a simple nix-env -i.

@Profpatsch Are you at all ready to revisit this? I think especially now that there is a daemon, it would be nice to have a module that handles starting a systemd service for you.

We don’t have the resources right now to maintain & support a stable version in nixpkgs. See target/lorri#96 for approaches other people have used. I think it’s good experiment to collect a few approaches first.

I'm with @srhb — this is a bad precedent. :)

In the meanwhile, I'm cheating because lorri is amazing! Thanks so much for building this tool!