What about using mirror://sourceforge/bashdb (instead of sourceforge/sourceforge/bashdb)

Also, consider re-using name (or factoring out a version attr) in src.url.

Good suggestions! I'll give them a try,

If you make the attrset passed to mkDerivation recursive, you can inline this, as in

stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
  name = "...";
   src = {
     url = ".../${name}.tar.bz2";
   }
}

Really! I did not know that. So, by adding the rec keyword, attributes can refer to other attributes within the same set? Are there any drawbacks to using the rec keyword, or is it to be preferred over the let version that I first wrote?

For very complicated stuff it may be clearer to use explicit recursion (to not lose track of what is being referred to exactly), but it's almost always better to use rec if possible.

Ok, then I know. Thank you!

rec { foo = "x"; bar = foo; }

basically desugars to

let self = { foo = "x"; bar = self.foo; }; in self

Ah. That makes it a lot clearer; thanks for explaining!