[Nix-dev] [***SPAM***] Re: experience packager or coder to help me with cinnamon

[phreedom at yandex.ru]

On Thursday, November 28, 2013 07:31:29 PM Roelof Wobben wrote:
> Im now 3 days at work to make cinnamon-desktop working so Nixos can have
> Cinnamon 2.x It looks like to me the configure and make files are really
> broken. On make I see several error messages about missing and not found
> error messages.
> 
> Now I wonder if there is a experienced packager of coder who is willing to
> be a sort of mentor so we get the packages working.

I don't think there are experienced packagers who are *unwilling* to help. 
However, everyone has a todo list and a real life that gets in the way. If you 
want assistance, you have to be patient.

If you want things to happen faster, you have to be ready to get your hands 
dirty and reach under the hood. If there's a systematic problem with 
configure/makefiles, it makes sense to invest some time into looking at the 
source. These files may be big, but they certainly are rather simple.

You have to realize that the build errors you are getting aren't reported by 
nix, they are produced by these files. When you look at the sources, it 
becomes quite clear what went wrong. Is it because a path is wrong or 
hardcoded? Which env var/configure parameter influeces the searched paths? Is 
there some undocumented(but very obiouvs) var/parameter that you can set to 
point the buildsystem in the right direction?

Now that you know what went wrong, you can reformulate your question like 
"what is the best practice to do X in nixpkgs?" where X could be passing an 
ENV var to the builder, patching a makefile or other simple technical 
question. Such questions can be quickly answered by grepping the source, or 
looking at similar packages(or packages with similar deps). If you ask simple, 
technical and nix-related questions in the channel, you are also much more 
likely to get a quick response, because people often just know the answer.

It is very unfortunate that cinnamon has problems in the buildsystem 
department. There are large (and larger) software suites which follow the best 
practice packaging, such as X11, KDE, and thus require very little or no hacks 
and sometimes are even autopackaged by scripts.

If you feel strongly about Cinnamon, you might also want to do the right thing 
and fix their buildsystem instead/in adddition and contribute your fixes 
upstream.