[Nix-dev] Re: RHEL5 Issues re-visited.

[Jeevakan Suresh]

> The situation appears to be quite unsatisfactory

It sure is. However the kernel is the only unavoidable dependency
between NIX and the underlying host OS. *sigh*

> Personally, I feel that sticking to glibc 2.5 and coreutils 6.11 is
the way to go 
I guess it really depends on your use case. In my situation nix will be
deployed to a bunch of machines, all *guaranteed* to be running the same
kernel. The real issue (apart from RHEL being non standard) is
everything depends on glibc, which in turn depends on the kernel
headers. We can either settle for a lowest common dominator which we
know to work (ie. Using old versions) - or ensure that we always use the
correct kernel headers. 

> It feels like there is no silver bullet for RHEL5.
It sure sounds like it. Thanks for helping out and testing my patch
anyway. I guess this is a limitation of *any* package manager if you
want it to work in heterogeneous environments. Ahh well, we tried :)


Cheers
Jeeva


-----Original Message-----
From: nix-dev-bounces at cs.uu.nl [mailto:nix-dev-bounces at cs.uu.nl] On
Behalf Of Peter Simons
Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 11:45 AM
To: nix-dev at cs.uu.nl
Subject: [Nix-dev] Re: RHEL5 Issues re-visited.

Hi Jeevakan,

 > My hunch is our kernels are subtly different. My experience is the  >
headers and kernel must match *exactly*.

I don't have access to those machines right now, but it's quite possible
that I've been using a subtly different kernel version than the one
you've been using.

The situation appears to be quite unsatisfactory. It's impossible for me
to ensure that the version of the running kernel matches the version of
the kernel headers used to compile Nix. I need an installation that
lives on a network drive and is supposed to run unmodified on 50+ Linux
machines. Those machines differ subtly; that's exactly why I want a
self-contained installation like Nix that doesn't care about the
underlying host OS. If I'd have to re-build my Nix store on every
machine, then Nix would be quite a lot less useful for me than it is
now.

Personally, I feel that sticking to glibc 2.5 and coreutils 6.11 is the
way to go because that works just fine. However, my requirements
probably differ from those other people might have. It feels like there
is no silver bullet for RHEL5.

Take care,
Peter

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