[Nix-dev] Nix as a build script for developers

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

Sam Thursfield wrote:

> I've just found out about Nix and I think its a very interesting
> project. Straight away it gave me an idea (and apologies if this has
> been mentioned before; I did do a search in the archives first): ..
> Since Nix can build packages from source, does anyone think it would
> be neat to use it as a replacement for complex build scripts, like
> GNOME's jhbuild?

Yes, I do :-)

A long time ago I wrote some Nix functions to compile C source files, link
object files etc. (see https://svn.nixos.org/repos/nix/nix/trunk/make). This is
described in chapter 10 of my PhD thesis
(http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf).  However, we
haven't really done anything further along these lines since (except that we
have some Nix functions to build our LaTeX documents ;-)

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