[Nix-dev] announce: Ruby & Nixpkgs

[Marc Weber]

I updated the gemnix patch. This time it creates a huge file containing
all known specs by rubygems. A very trivial Nix implementation resolves
dependencies (hopefully) the way rubygems does it.

This means that you can install almost all Ruby packages using the nix
package manager.

  The nix code (and the .nix file containing the specs):
  http://gitorious.org/nixpkgs-ruby-overlay

  the gem patch:
  http://gitorious.org/rubygems-nix-patch/rubygems-nix-patch


usage looks like this:

    tested18 = rubyPackages18 [
          "nokogiri" "rake" "escape"
          "git"
          "hoe"
          "rubyforge"
          "json_pure"
          "chronic"
          "rubygems_update"
          "jeweler"
          "rake"
          "ncursesw"
          "trollop"
          "gettext"
          "locale"
          "lockfile"
          "rmail"
          "highline"
          "net_ssh"
          "mime_types"
          "sup" # curses is distributed with ruby
          "xrefresh-server"
    ];

which creates an attr set of those ruby packages. Next step is to add
support for Ruby-1.9.

Right now there is a catch. The nix code depends on some additional
patches:
- support for nixpkgs overlays: add some lines to nixpkgs making it
  easier to put additional derivations into extra repos.
  Its used by nixpkgs-haskell-overlay and nixpkgs-ruby-overlay.

  I chose to put code into additional repos because they cause huge
  amounts of data which can change often (such as hackage dumps or
  rubygems dumps)

- support for arbitrary strings in attr names in particular when
  declaring attrs. Example: { "foo": "bar" }

  I tried getting feedback about the implementation details multiple
  times to no avail.


Because I'd like to share those changes I'm going to setup and maintain
git mirrors - see other mail.

If you're interested in using Ruby packages using the nix package
manager let me know so that I can help you setting it up.

Marc Weber