Hi, I address some of the issues you wrote: On 09/09/2014 07:24 PM, Gergö Barany wrote:
- I found it puzzling that the package channel is to be set imperatively on the command line rather than in the configuration file. This breaks the nice property of the entire configuration being in one or more config files.
I think the decision when to update the channel(s) needs to be done imperatively, as it is inherently impure and in many cases one does *not* want to update the channel (one may not want to update everything because of some minor config change).
Moreover, channels are also per-user, whereas configuration.nix is only global. ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix might be a suitable per-user place to add configuration of channel locations, although I don't feel strongly about that.
- In the manual, it would be nice to have Appendix B avaiable as a single HTML page separate from the rest of the manual. (Told you these were minor comments.) That would make full-text search for some options easier.
Personally, I use "man configuration.nix" for that purpose. Also, IIRC the manual will be split into one page per section; I saw a preview of that a week or two ago, but apparently it is not so on the main web yet. Moreover, some web app for nixos option is being worked on, I think.
Configuration: - I haven't gone very deep here, but if I add a user in configuration.nix and do nixos-rebuild, and then modify the configuration to add extraGroups (such as wheel) for that user and run nixos-rebuild --switch again, then the extra group setting just seems to be ignored; the user is not added to the group. (Would it be OK to file this as a bug against nixpkgs? If not, what github project should it be?)
It certainly belongs to the nixpkgs repository. I don't know these details, as I only use it on a single-user system with imperative user management.
Package installation:
- ghc. I didn't care about the exact version, just hoped that a
"meta-package" named "ghc" would work. Here's a complete config file I
tried:
[...]
When running "nixos-rebuild build" on this, it failed with:
error: cannot coerce a set to a string, at
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos/nixpkgs/lib/types.nix:98:79
Needless to say, I never touched that file. If I recall correctly,
specifying a *concrete* ghc package name did work. Using a generic name
imperatively worked: "nix-env -i ghc" selects a derivation automagically and
installs it.
The attribute path pkgs.ghc is *not* a package (which is a bit counter-intuitive naming, I guess). It is an attrmap of all ghc versions we build. nix-env without -A takes package names, which is something different than attribute paths.
I think haskellPackages.ghc is the preferred attribute path to the default ghc.
- clementine (a music player). The issue here was that by default it depends
on the unfree libspotify package, but there is an option to install it
without this library. However, it didn't work for me:
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
# [...]
config.clementine.spotify = false;
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
wget vim
clementine
];
}
Trying to build this fails with:
error: Module `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix' has an unsupported attribute
`boot'.
This appears to be some sort of internal error in nixos-rebuild, maybe with
parsing the config file?
1) It should be nixpkgs.config.clementine.spotify = false; The error message is very unhelpful, I agree. I presume it is because the config attribute is reused in the attribute map when processing it.
2) I see the clementine on 14.04 branch still doesn't look at that setting. It always builds with spotify. On master it's without spotify by default and can be overridden by the config.
- swt (a Java GUI toolkit, needed by some Java programs). Trying to install this (with a config file as above, only with "swt" in the package list) tries to download http://eclipse.ialto.com/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip and fails, since that file (and the directory it is supposed to be in) doesn't exist. A file with that name is available from a more official source at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip I tried remounting the package store read-write and copying this file to the expected place, but the installer didn't pick it up from there, it tried the broken mirror again. Is there a way to inject a manually downloaded file into the build process, or to specify another download URL, short of modifying the Nix expression for the package?
The paths in nix store have to be sanitized and registered by nix. For similar purposes there is the nix-prefetch-url command. In master we already use a valid URL, so I ported the change to 14.04. ( http://archive.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip )
Vladimir
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