Could we have a nix upgrade documentation somewhere? (@amahboubi)

[CohenCyril]

a doc on

• upgrading the local nix shell (shell.nix) on analysis?
• or upgrading the package definitions (mathcomp/extra.nix) on nixpkgs?

Originally posted by @CohenCyril in #147 (comment)

[amahboubi]

@CohenCyril it would be great indeed.
For the first one, I can try to write a few lines (when other deadlines are over), provided someone tells me the right way of finding the commit name to be inserted. I still do not understand and made blind try-and-error. For the second point, I have no idea how to do that.

[amahboubi]

Also, I have the feeling this is not at all specific to our case. And would be relevant at other places like here, or here. Pointers provided by @Zimmi48.

[Zimmi48]

A few tips:

• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/ provides master and release-YY-MM branches
• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels provides nixpkgs-unstable and nixos-YY-MM branches

When updating, you generally want to select the tip of one of those branches, except in some special cases. For development, I personally tend to pick preferably nixpkgs-unstable (which is the same as master excepts that it lags a bit because packages are tested before the branch is updated).
Whenever the package you need has just been included in master, it might not yet be available in nixpkgs-unstable and the use of a more recent commit is possible.
If the package is not yet in master but only in some PR or some branch somewhere else, you may want to pick this location instead.
Hopefully at some point, we will provide something (a flake?) that makes it easy to use any package in the Coq package index with Nix. But in the meantime, if a package is not in nixpkgs yet, it might need to be manually added.

[CohenCyril]

Thanks @amahboubi and @Zimmi48.
Also the place were to edit mathcomp package sha256s and depencendies is here:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/coq-modules/mathcomp/extra.nix

[CohenCyril]

I am waiting for a release of multinomials that depends on finmap 1.3 (or waiting until I do it myself) in order to upgrade nixpkgs with finmap 1.3

[affeldt-aist]

a doc on

* upgrading the local nix shell (shell.nix) on analysis?

* or upgrading the package definitions (mathcomp/extra.nix) on nixpkgs?

Originally posted by @CohenCyril in #147 (comment)

does https://github.com/math-comp/math-comp/wiki/Using-nix address this issue?
(I have never been able to fully grasp nix)
or, since the issue is old, are there other links that now address this issue? (fyi: @proux01 )

[Zimmi48]

There are plans to write official Nix docs on the Rocq website FWIW. This should address this question among others.