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

[Sam Thursfield]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl> wrote:
> 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 ;-)

Excellent, I'll have a read ... like I said, Nix does seem like the
ultimate solution for my goal of building some gnome libraries under
mingw with a minimum of hassles, when I have time to look at it.

BTW MSYS/mingw is such a hellish platform that it's an ideal use-case
for Nix, I mean the MSYSgit people actually ship an entire separate
MSYS environment because it's all so fragile ..

Thanks to everyone else who responded, this is all very helpful and
it's nice to know Nix has quite a bit of hidden power.

sam