[Nix-dev] Doc feedback: the very first steps

[Ville Oikarinen]

Hello.

First, thank you for a very inspiring bunch of ideas and implementations,
I really hope nix will work for me, to help fight against the constant
software rot around us. (Configuration file rot is another problem, but I
don't think even nix addresses that or does it?)

(Btw, I'm using gentoo right now, the best package management environment
so far IMHO; if only it utilized its SLOTs more...)

I downloaded the latest stable nix source package, 0.21, and tried to get 
going. But things are not quite straightforward:

First, the docs state that --prefix=/nix is the default, but it seems it's
/usr/local. At least make install (as a normal user!) tried to create
/usr/local/libexec or something and failed.

(I had created /nix and chowned it to my normal user.)

Then I started over with ./configure --prefix=/nix, and this time both
make and make install worked.

Next I found the order things are mentioned in the documentation a bit
confusing: only the quick start told to add a channel, and the "actual"  
body of the manual just says "Assuming that you have downloaded and
unpacked a release of Nix Packages..." and other hand-waving like that.

Is there a reason the quick start tells to use an unstable channel?  
Anyway, I decided to play it safe and tried to add a stable channel:

nix-channel --add ...../nixpkgs-stable

But nix-channel isn't in the PATH, even though I had sourced 
/nix/etc/profile.d/nix.sh

Ok, I used the full path, /nix/bin/nix-channel and managed to add the
channel.

Next I tried /nix/bin/nix-env -i hello but couldn't connect to
nix.cs.uu.nl to download linux-headers.

Is this a temporary failure? Are there any mirrors I should use?

I would appreciate a proper step-by-step documentation to get started. 

Kind regards,
Ville Oikarinen