[Nix-dev] Porting NixOS

[Daniel Clark]

I'm in the process of seeing how hard it would be to port NixOS to
non-intel architectures / boot loaders other than grub. Specifically
I'm working with a Loongson 2f machine, which is a mipsel64 (64-bit
MIPS little-endian) machine that uses the PMON 2000 boot loader.

At the moment I'm just starting to play with the build tools - I have
nix built, and am working on compiling nixpkgs. Before I start down a
path of naive stupidity, I thought I'd ping the list and see if anyone
more familiar with the project had given thought on an architecture
that would allow NixOS to revert to previous configurations as part of
the normal boot process, instead of via a boot loader (even if PMON
2000 could be made to work like grub does, I think it would be too
annoying to have to redo that integration with every random boot
loader out there - there are more than you would think).

I'd also like to know if there is any interest amongst the NixOS
developers to make NixOS a distribution that would be compliant with
the FSF/GNU Project's Guidelines for Free System Distributions [1] and
thus recommendable by the Free Software Foundation, and if not if
there would be any major objections to someone creating a NixOS
variant that would be (as far as I can tell the Nix package management
system would make such a fork much less disruptive and able to give
back to core NixOS than other package management systems).

Specifically I'm looking for an operating system that is a better
candidate for the port described above than gNewSense. The technical
problem of the gNewSense GNU/Linux / Debian build infrastructure being
significantly less pretty than Nix is in theory fixable [2,3], but the
political problem of gNewSense being based on Ubuntu, and
Ubuntu/Canonical having little interest in creating and maintaining
ports to less-mainstream architectures seems less surmountable.

I also think that Nix is just better suited than Debian for a
operating system for people who really, really care about using only
Free Software (think rms), as it looks like it is provable that a
piece of software is derived only from other pieces of free software,
and also possible to easily audit a distribution to make sure binaries
that are not actually derivable from available free software sources
are not included.

BTW I added the 3 nix-related projects that weren't in ohloh to ohloh
[4]; I forget which 3 they were, but in general core nix developers
might want to go and take management ownership of the projects.

[1] FSF/GNU Project Guidelines for Free System Distributions
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html

[2] ohloh: gNewSense Builder
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/gnewsense-builder

[3] gNewSense Official Website: Builder / Builder
http://www.gnewsense.org/index.php?n=Builder.Builder

[4] ohloh: Search Projects: nix
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/search?q=nix

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel JB Clark # http://opensysadmin.com