[Nix-dev] [submission] boost-1.35.0.nix

[Marc Weber]

Hi Peter,

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 10:12:53PM +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I managed to build version 1.35.0 of the boost libraries with the nix
> expression that is attached below. The all-packages.nix reference looks
> like this:
> 
>   boost = import ../.nixpkgs/boost-1.35.0.nix
>   {
>     inherit fetchurl stdenv icu zlib bzip2 python;
>   };
> 
> The nix expression can be improved quite a bit. For starters, it should
> be customizable whether debug-versions of libraries are desired. There
> should probably also be a "doc" flag that triggers installation of the
> HTML documentation. I might be able to do that later, but the machine
> I'm using right now is way too slow for repeatedly building that
> package. :-)
> 
> Is there a way to tell nix-build that it should re-use a previously
> generated working directory? I realize that this would make the build
> less clean, 
which we don'nt want at all but it's ok for developping.
Have you already seen the nix-env -K flag ? It tells nix to not delete
the working directory. Then you can cd into it and source env-vars and
continue / debug where the build process has failed.

Of course you are free to add some code to move/ copy symlin, any
(impure) files from tmp into the working build directory which has been
done for cvs or svn k/ darcs (?) fetch builders some time ago I no
longer recall the derivation name.

There is a less mature alternative. Try installing an env as described
in myenv (which you'll find at the end of all-packages.nix)
then you'll can loadEnv "envname" and see wether you can compile your
library without nix-env. I've added for developement purposes only.
A lot of things may not work and the main thing it does is exporting
NIX_COMPILE_FLAGS and NIX_LD_FLAGS as CFLAGS and LDFLAGS so that most
configure scripts are told about dependencies. Maybe you want to try it
and give me some feedback?

Sincerly
Marc Weber