Another issue I just remembered is that of setuid binaries. NixOS has a mechanism for it, and it could just as easily be used elsewhere. Without it, you can't easily use qemu for example.
Wout. On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:28 PM, Wout Mertens <wout.mert...@gmail.com>wrote: > I think there is room for improvement for installing and using nixpkgs on > another distribution. > > I see two big problems: > 1. installation > 2. environment variables > > Installation: > ======== > The single-user installation is cute, but realistically you need root > anyway to create /nix so it would be nice if there was a script that set up > the proper environment, with the correct permissions under /nix/var/nix, > the system-wide shell profiles, nixbld users, a > users-that-are-allowed-to-use-nix-env group and the nix-daemon startup > script for the popular distros. > > Right now you need to manually do these things, and some are not obvious > like having to change your ~/.nix-profile dir to a per-user one > (/etc/profile.d/nix.sh points it to /nix/var/nix/profiles/default which > doesn't exist, and nix-env -i doesn't seem to handle that case). > > The end goal should be "run this script and you'll have full access to > everything in Nixpkgs with per-user profiles and secure defaults". All > barriers to adoption should be removed as much as possible. > > Environment Variables: > ================= > There are several packages that rely on environment variables to work > correctly, like glibc ($TZ_DIR) and curl ($CURL_CA_BUNDLE). Those aren't > defined when you're not on NixOS. > For the regular $NIX_PATH, $PATH etc, sourcing nix.sh from /etc/profile > isn't enough, because for example ssh doesn't start a bash login shell. For > those cases, it needs to be sourced from /etc/bash.bashrc as well. > Similar issues are probably happening with tcsh, zsh etc. > > Thoughts? > > Wout. >
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