[Nix-dev] pidgin-sipe

[Shea Levy]

On 11/2/11 1:29 AM, Kevin Quick wrote:
> 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.
>

Hi Kevin,

I'll take a look into the pidgin source over the next few days, see what 
would be necessary to have it find plugins elsewhere.

~Shea