I've talked a bit about this on IRC earlier today, but I think the issue deserves an in-depth discussion. It's more of a general policy question, a clash of an imperative world and a pure functional one. I'm trying to package a Java program, a client, which can be (among other things) updated by the server.
At first, I put everything into the store, but then the client received an update command from the server and attempted to create a directory in the store (probably based on the program location), which failed. The program is proprietary, so I tried to find a way to change this behavior in the docs, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do it. And it wouldn't solve the issue anyway. The server is controlled by other people. Even if I find a way to solve this for this particular version, e.g., by putting some files into a mutable directory (more on this below), the new client version, which will be installed by the server, might contain other unexpected features, which might prevent the client from operating properly. Has anyone packaged something like this? What's a proper way to solve this without compromising the integrity of a system (think of potential security issues or just proper operation)? NixOS supports containers, but I haven't used them yet, can it be the answer? What would be an expected mutable location for something like this? There's, for instance, /var/lib as described in http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARLIBVARIABLESTATEINFORMATION, but I can't even use it since that requires sudo, which is a no go for a build script. I need to copy the files into a mutable directory at build time (I'm using the builder.sh way as described in the Nixpkgs manual). _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev