[Nix-dev] How do I ...

[Pjotr Prins]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for helping out! Now I have config.nix sorted, git running etc.
In fact wrote a package for a notoriously difficult to deploy
application on our clients - and it works great! No more messing
about with dependencies.

I had a few problems earlier, mostly to do with an older Nix version
not recognizing config.nix. Worse a new installation would just
'Abort' any nix command, without further messages. What solved it was
to remove the profile and start again. I guess in a profile
occassionaly there is the possibility of inconsitencies. Don't know
how, but thanks to the flexibility of profiles it is easy to solve.

At this point there are two things staring me in the face: first,
because kernel headers have to match a kernel (it is really ill
advised to do that differently) we have an issue with binary
deployment. With different headers coreutils will change and anything
depending on that will also get built. This is something to think
about. I think we ought to support binaries for a limited number of
kernels - but certainly not just only one kernel version.

The other thing is garbage collection. When I collect, very little
gets removed. Does this mean I have to destroy old profiles? What
tricks are there in the book? 60Gb /nix partitions appear to be too
small now ;-).

Pj.