[Nix-dev] Updating /etc/nix/nix.conf before building packages during nixos-rebuild

[Wout Mertens]

You know, this feels a little wrong.

/etc/nixos+nixpkgs describes the whole system, including how to build it,
and here the build process will differ depending on previous state.

Wouldn't it make more sense to build  the nix config before building the
rest? Or at least use the new config for the entire build, installing when
the build succeeds?

Wout.
On May 23, 2014 8:39 PM, "Mateusz Kowalczyk" <fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk>
wrote:

> On 05/23/2014 09:44 AM, Luca Bruno wrote:
> > On 23/05/2014 03:50, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I saw that Hydra built some packages that I want already, for example Qt
> >> 4.8.6. I need that and it takes a very long time (and usually OOMs) on
> >> my machine so I thought, hey, why not just fetch it from Hydra.
> >>
> >> I found binaryCaches option but it is set in /etc/nix/nix.conf that's
> >> generated from /etc/nixos/configuration.nix.
> >>
> >> The problem is that even if I set nix.binaryCaches = [ … ]; in my
> >> configuration.nix, it won't get applied until after the rebuild. Namely,
> >> nixos-rebuild wants to build Qt (and many others) itself, so it's not
> >> looking at the binary cache first.
> >>
> >> Is there a way to cheat it and generate nix.conf first and only then
> >> calculate which packages we can fetch and which we have to build?
> >>
> >> Notably, manually running
> >>
> >> nix-install-package --non-interactive --url
> >>
> http://hydra.nixos.org/build/11188799/nix/pkg/qt-4.8.6-i686-linux.nixpkg
> >>
> >> installs Qt fine and nixos-rebuild no longer wants to build it itself.
> >> That's great but there are many packages and I can't try to find each on
> >> Hydra by hand.
> >>
> > nixos-rebuild .... --option binary-caches "http://... ..." should do it.
> > _______________________________________________
> > nix-dev mailing list
> > nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
> >
>
> This does what I want. Perhaps nixos-rebuild manual should mention
> --options, otherwise the user has to look for binary-caches in Nix
> manual itself.
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Mateusz K.
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