Until the attribute name issue is clarified, I cherry-picked the fetchpatch issue into #81564 since it is very annoying.

cc @edolstra

I think it's really important we decide what the attribute for #79987 (comment) is going to be. There's already some stigma on base64 encoding and sri in nixpkgs #89423 #89423 and this is awfully difficult, for example, to explain to people that they can't use hash in fetchFromGitHub correctly because if they set fetchSubmodules = true the fetcher will be fetchgit which doesn't support hash yet...

narHash is probably best. hash can be misunderstood as a commit hash, and integrity doesn't say whether it's a NAR hash or a flat file hash.

@edolstra What attribute will we use for flat files then?

And why do we need to distinguish between NAR hash and flat file hash by the checksum attribute? It could just be hidden inside the fetch functions and switched through outputHashMode as before.

Flat file hashes are used in many places, e.g. fetchurl.

@edolstra I meant what attribute would we use for flat file hashes if we want to distinguish them from NAR hashes. fechurl currently uses sha256 for both and used a separate recursiveHash attribute as a switch between the two outputHashModes. So it does not say whether it's a NAR hash or a flat file hash any more that integrity would.

I agree with @jtojnar. Choosing between a file hash or a NAR hash seems like more of an implementation detail of the fetcher, rather than something that always needs to be specified by the package maintainer. I think if we required maintainers to declare it explicitly, it would cause a lot of confusion, especially for beginners.

For example, this would use a file hash:

fetchurl {
  url = "https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-2.3.10/install";
  hash = "sha256-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=";
}

But this would require a NAR hash:

fetchurl {
  url = "https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-2.3.10/install";
  executable = true;
  narHash = "sha256-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=";
}

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/is-it-ok-to-ask-for-hash-attribute-and-sri-hash-when-reviewing-prs-that-update-packages/20493/3

support for hashes added in 5c2b1b6