[Nix-dev] Re: Some newbie doubts

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

wahjava.ml at gmail.com (Ashish SHUKLA)
writes:

> At the moment, all of my disks are GPT partitioned, and I use GRUB2 as the
> bootloader.

NixOS supports GRUB 2 now: just set ‘boot.loader.grub.version’ = 2.

> 1. Check for the presence of repository directory.
> 2. If repository directory is present, then update the source code using VCS
>    tool (.i.e. git pull, svn update, etc.), else checkout copy from the
>    repository (.i.e. git clone, svn co, etc.).

The Nix approach is to start anew to maximize reproducibility, i.e.,
always use ‘git clone’.  This is what the ‘fetchgit’ Nix function does.

For instance, you could regularly update the ‘emacsSnapshot’ package,
updating the Git/Bzr revision identifier and corresponding hash every
once in a while, for the benefit of all Nixpkgs users.  :-)

Now, Marc Weber implemented a tool to support the kind of workflow you
have in mind, but I don’t know the details.  Marc?

> And also I noticed the layout of NixOS website has changed recently. I'm not
> able to locate list of packages currently available in the stable channel. Can
> anyone point me to some link which contains the list of packages available in
> the current 'nixpkgs' collection ?

Try this: http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nixpkgs/trunk .

Hydra is the system that continuously builds Nixpkgs.

Thanks,
Ludo’.