[Nix-dev] What kind of "install" do we have in freebsd stdenv?

[James Cook]

On 11 May 2012 13:11, Peter Simons <simons at cryp.to> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
>  > FreeBSD has its own core software, with some differences from GNU
>  > coreutils: for example, tar by default writes to a tape drive instead
>  > of stdout, and the default /bin/sh is simpler than bash.
>
> thank you for the explanation. I guess, what I wonder is: should the feature
> set of the tools available in *stdenv* vary from one platform to the other?
> Wouldn't it be easier to write robust build scripts if 'install' would
> always understand -D? In other words, shouldn't coreutils be part of stdenv
> on FreeBSD?
>
> Take care,
> Peter

I'm not using FreeBSD at the moment; maybe someone who is can comment?

I remember from when I was using FreeBSD with nix that these
differences caused a lot of little problems; I'd often have to make
little changes to nixpkgs to get things working. Also, last I checked,
stdenv on FreeBSD just used standard paths like /usr/bin/sed (is this
considered an impurity?). So switching to GNU coreutils would increase
the size of stdenv on FreeBSD, but would result in more consistency
between systems.

One advantage to keeping FreeBSD's stdenv more BSD-ish is it would
check that things are portable and not GNU-specific. Probably not
realistic unless we've got some really active FreeBSD users though.

James