[Nix-dev] Getting started with nix-build

[Jeffrey David Johnson]

Yeah I'd like to know this too. I suspect there's a flag for it but not sure what it would be called.

Also if you're building the latext nixpkgs from github hydra might not have cought up yet. I think standard practice is to stay a few commits back so can get binaries. I asked a semi-related question a couple days ago and Jonothan Glines showed me this script for checking out the latest commit that's made it to the unstable channel:

git branch myBranch `curl -sI http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable/ | grep Location | perl -n -e'/([0-9a-f]{7})\/\s*$/ && print $1'`

I haven't tried it yet but looks like it might be what you want.
Jeff

On Tue, 24 Mar 2015 09:49:11 +0000
Oliver Matthews <ojm at codersoffortune.net> wrote:

> So, I'm attempting to add a plex package. I've followed the instructions in the nixpkgs manual (and cross-checked with contributing to nixpkgs on the wiki). It's all fine up until I run nix-build -A - it's going to attempt to build my package, but also goodly chunks of the full OS starting with glibc. I could understand this if I'd specified versions of libraries not in what hydra is currently building, but I've not. I suspect I'm either invoking nixbuild wrong (nix-build -K --dry-run -A plex-media-server from ~/src/nixpkgs) or I'm missing the nix equivalent of build-essential. Or I'm missing part of the point entirely, but I would have expected the docs (somewhere) to warn that attempting to run nix-build will attempt to compile a full toolchain from scratch (which requires a fair amount of diskspace and time).
> 
> Regards,
> Oliver
>