[Nix-dev] Manual Downloads of Proprietary Software

[Shea Levy]

On 04/13/2011 02:28 PM, Shea Levy wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some software (e.g. Adobe Air) requires that the person installing it 
> agree to certain terms prior to downloading the file. While in many 
> (though not all) cases it is possible to simply put the download URL 
> into a nix expression and have nix download the file automatically, 
> such circumvention of the terms-and-conditions agreement seems legally 
> shaky at best. As such, I would like to create a function that looks 
> for a file on the local filesystem and aborts with a message that the 
> user must download the file manually before building the derivation 
> (if such a function already exists, please let me know). My question 
> for the list is this: How should the function find the file? I can 
> think of three ways, but I'm not sure which is best: having the user 
> download the file to a hard-coded location, having the user set an env 
> var with the location of the file, or having the user nix-store --add 
> the file manually. Or is there a better solution than any of these?
>
> Cheers,
> Shea Levy
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> nix-dev at cs.uu.nl
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I have been pointed to the requireFile function, which I believe does 
what I want.