[Nix-dev] Re: Non-root packaging system + stdenvNative and replace-literal

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

2011/2/23 Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org>:
> Hi,
>
> Dag Sverre Seljebotn <dagseljebotn at gmail.com> writes:
>

<snip>

>> 2) Regarding space, there's things like X libraries, GNOME, KDE and so
>> on, that one may want to have a dependency on in visualization
>> packages but which would really blow up the size (and yes,
>> stdenvNative doesn't help here, it was just a place to start.). I'm
>> sorry, but given the choice between linking with your X/GTK/Qt and
>> Ubuntu's, I'd take Ubuntu's.
>
> But then you’d need a super-duper ‘stdenvNative’, with the goal of
> working around the Nix philosophy.

I was hoping to do better than this: Let there be qt-native,
gtk+-native, gl-native, and so on, and let each such package set up
symlinks etc. as part of the build. As "input" to the packages
(producing the hash) one would have the results of version detection
etc. Such packages could be set up by an external probing script.

So builds would be able to build without pulling in -I/usr/include.

Thus if one goes with the nix gcc toolchain, but gl-native, then one
is protected against leakage from the system beyond exactly the
leakage that is specified.

Perhaps one could even play with LD_PRELOAD on the native gcc in order
to protect against (non-intended) leakage...

> Did you consider other tools like Zero-Install [0], GUB [1], or even
> good old makefiles as in BSD ports or GAR as used in GNU SRC [2]?

Thanks for the pointers. I only knew about the first one, but I should
re-evaluate it. I also tried Gentoo Prefix but it was even less
suitable than nix.

There's also a whole host of scientific Python distributions; I've
been using Sage (sagemath.org) until now, which is similar to some of
these tools, and am looking for something more sophisticated to
replace it.

I'm just very attracted to nix because of the technological foundation
it builds on. And I want to have the option to subscribe to all of the
"nix philosophy", but only optionally.

Dag Sverre