[Nix-dev] pidgin-sipe

[Kevin Quick]

On Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:23:38 -0700, Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:

>> For usage I would suggest the derivation notify the user that they will
>> need to link ~/.nix-profile/share/pidgin-sipe/libsipe.so to
>> ~/.purple/plugins/libsipe.so (or something along those lines).

>   I haven't used pidgin in years, can you explain this? There's no good  
> way to notify the user of needed actions beyond just running the build.  
> If pidgin doesn't know how to find plugins outside of the ~/.purple  
> path, maybe we could patch pidgin or run it in a wrapper so that it can  
> find plugins elsewhere.

I agree there's no good way to notify the user (that I've noticed).  I've  
seen some derivations echo to stdout in a post install step, but that's  
easily lost if this is not the final derivation built.

Having not run pidgin for sometime myself, it took a bit of digging to  
determine that the library built by pidgin-sipe needed to be in  
~/.purple/plugins/ to be recognized by pidgin.  I didn't encounter a lot  
of alternatives in my search and I don't have any great suggestions,  
although having both pidgin and pigdin-sipe install to a share/pidgin  
might be the most useful nix-style solution.  I'm not fully cognizant of  
how these types of add-ons are handled (although I suspect it's a very  
similar topic to packages for haskell, ruby, python, etc.).

-KQ

P.S.  Thanks for the commit.

-- 
-KQ