@Ericson2314, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @aske, @obadz, @rardiol and @FRidh to be potential reviewers.

Renaming files that everyone changes all the time is going to break almost every open PR or branch...

Hmm git itself can easily deal with renamed files, but github isn't so clever.

Is there an overview of what the desired structure of the top-level functions and repository layout is?

In my opinion we should just move python-packages.nix to pkgs/development/python-modules/default.nix.

@FRidh this is my own vison, if you will :). If you see how I split top-level/default.nix into top-level/stage.nix in #15043, this is moving things around to further that distinction.

These are not stages, but collections / indexes of packages.
The stages would be the steps taken by the top-level to aggregate stdenv and others.

I think pkgs/indexes/node-packages.nix makes more sense than pkgs/stages/node-packages.nix.
Also, if all these indexes / collections are suffixed by -packages, maybe we should move this particle to the directory name, if it is not explicit yet, such as pkgs/indexes/npm.nix, pkgs/indexes/pip.nix, pkgs/indexes/cabal.nix ?

What do you think?

@nbp I like it! While yes stage/default.nix computes a single bootstrapping stage, that involves little more than aggregating the indices. And certainly everything else in there is an index that just happens to be used for computing a single stage—and it's better to label our "nouns" by what they are than how they are used.

I'll change this PR accordingly in a few minites, and also change the documentation in now-called indices/default.nix to philosophicly align.

Not sure if I'm actually causing some sort of pythonic mass rebuild, or Travis was just having a bad day.

Any update on this pull request?

I think moving the package sets into their own folder is not a bad idea, although it's a pain when going through the history. if we would do this, then may as well create a new commit and PR.