[jsmith45]

Some context: Frenck is a core developer on the Home Assistant project, and was hired by Nabu Casa (the company the project's founder founded to try to create a sustainable funding source via adding some optional value-add services) to develop for Home Assistant full time.

If instead of packing these separately, the home assistant nixpkg for home assistant simply downloaded all the required dependencies from PyPi, and verified them against a maintained list of checksums as part of the nixpkg (for reproducibility), then frenck probably would not object to that, since the last I knew the some of the official home assistant docker images do preinstall the requirements for the majority of plugins like that.

I'm suspect frenck's real concern comes from any possibility of modifications in the packaged version, combined with any possibility of nix allowing home assistant to be used with a version that is not an exact match of what home assistant specifies.

Alternatively If this could be packages as some form of home-assistant sub-package that was guaranteed to always match the PyPi version specified for home assistant exactly, without any mixing and matching, it would likely allay his concerns. Unfortunately he has not spelled out his concerns fully, so I cannot know for sure. I also have no idea if this is at all feasible in the nix packaging system.

[aequitas]

> If instead of packing these separately, the home assistant nixpkg for home assistant simply downloaded all the required dependencies from PyPi, and verified them against a maintained list of checksums as part of the nixpkg (for reproducibility), then frenck probably would not object to that

From what I can tell the Home assistant core team doesn't not want to deal with any other installation variants than their own supported ones. Their user base consists of a lot of technical tinkering people (hobbyists, electricians, etc) but those who don't necessarily have Linux sysadmin skill's. So you could say they are skilled enough to get themselves in any of a hundred different configuration scenario's that would then need to be debugged by the HA developers for each support ticket. For a developer knowing the installation environment is at least sane is a great help.

That said, Home assistant does lend a lot of its growth to open source contributions, collaboration and being free software. If it was not as open in the beginning it might not have gathered enough attention to grow its current size. Cutting off developments in other directions like this to me feels against what FOSS stands for.