[Nix-dev] nixos-rebuild hangs

[Eelco Dolstra]

Andrew Morsillo wrote:

> After building the latest ISO and installing on a virtual machine doing 
> nixos-checkout then nixos-rebuild switch causes the terminal to hang 
> while executing "nix-env -p /nix/var/nix/profiles/system -f 
> /etc/nixos/nixos --set -A system" in the nixos-rebuild script. I am at a 
> loss as to how this can be resolved or even what the problem is.
> 
>  The only output given (even when the nix-env command is set to verbose) 
> is "obtaining list of Nix archives at 
> 'http://nix.cs.uu.nl/dist/nix/channels-v3/nixpkgs-unstable/MANIFEST.bz2'. 
> <http://nix.cs.uu.nl/dist/nix/channels-v3/nixpkgs-unstable/MANIFEST.bz2'.>..   
> 2433 store paths in manifest  store derivation is 
> /nix/store/(hash)-nix-0.12pre10798.drv   /nix/store/(hash)-nix-0.12pre10798"

It's apparently caused by the upgrade to Glibc 2.7.  Berkeley DB hangs on 
database environments created by BDB linked against Glibc 2.5, it seems.  A 
workaround to get things working again is described here:

   http://mail.cs.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2008-February/000555.html

BTW, I'm right now rewriting Nix to get rid of the Berkeley DB dependency, so we 
won't have problems like this in the future :-)

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/