[Nix-dev] nixos-rebuild switch and downloading missing files

[Erick Tryzelaar]

Eelco Dolstra wrote:
> The first part would be great but the second part very scary (letting the build
> farm commit automatically in the Nixpkgs source...).
>
> Maybe a nice approach would be for fetchurl to be expanded to look for tarballs
> in a set of default URLs.  So if you have
>
>   fetchurl {
>     src = http://example.org/tarball.tar.bz2;
>     md5 = HASH;
>   }
>
> it would first try to download from (say)
> http://nix.cs.uu.nl/dist/tarballs/HASH-tarball.tar.bz2 and maybe some more
> (configurable) locations.
>
> Extra points for transparently downloading large files via Bittorrent ;-)
>   

Also, I managed to manually download the files myself via archive.org, 
but I couldn't manage to get nix to use the file. I had muck with 
/etc/hosts in order to fool nix into downloading from a different 
server. Was there a directory that I could have just put it to get nix 
to use it automatically?