[Nix-dev] Re: paper

[Eelco Visser]

Hi William,

I have a bold idea ...

I switched to Ubuntu a couple of months ago. Before that I was using
Fedora Core 6, an rpm based distribution. I had installed nix on a
separate partition, so it survived the change of distributions, and
happily kept working. Since, as you have noted, there is no debian
distribution for Nix yet, I wouldn't know how to upgrade. (This is the
problem of deploying a deployment system with another deployment
system.) So I will start lobbying to include ubuntu in our buildfarm.
But that is of little help for you now, in the short term.

So here is the bold plan: If I could give you a copy of my /nix
directory, you wouldn't have any installation problems. At least we
could try it. Indeed, I have just made a tarball of my /nix dir and
uploaded it to my public_html dir:

  http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~eelco/nix.tar.gz

This should be unpacked in /nix

The only problem is that I have not included the /nix/store directory
since that is some 6GB. So I'm pretty sure this is going to cause a
problem with the database in /nix/var, since that now expects a store
filled with stuff.

Maybe one of the nice people at nix-dev can tell you how to reset the
database? More generally, all state information (profiles, derives,
...) should be deleted.

-- Eelco


On 6/27/07, William Cook <wcook at cs.utexas.edu> wrote:
> As usual... I am now lost in a spiral of building and installation issues on
> linux. I just want to install Stratego.. but I'm using Ubuntu (a very
> popular distro and the standard in my department) but it doesn't do RPMs and
> it doesn't have Nix. Since you use the Nix, which is non-standard, I have to
> install it. The only way to do that I can see is by a source install, so I
> have to build it. But then I start getting lots of inscrutable errors from
> the compilation, like "The C++ preprocessor /lib/cpp fails the sanity
> check... see config.log for more detials". BUt of course, config.log
> contains hundreds of lines of info, none of which seem related.
>
> I'll get there eventually, but this is truly horrible.
>
> William