[Nix-dev] Overriding top level /nix directory

[Tyson Whitehead]

I'm working on getting Nix onto our clusters to augment our standard CentOS 6 stack as a shared NFS mounted store.  I've reset the top level /nix directory to be on one of our shared storage systems (config.nix.storeDir and config.nix.stateDir).

For the most part this has worked pretty well.  Grepping the repo for /nix/store and /nix/var reveals several packages have baked in these paths.  I was going to go through and change these to config.nix.storeDir and config.nix.stateDir as appropriate.

Upon reflection though, I don't think that is correct.  It should be the value for the running nix toolset and not the one that toolset would specify to a new toolset it built as former, not the later, is where packages compiled with the current toolset are going to windup.

I don't see any easy way to get this though.  This leaves me wondering if a new primop to expose the running toolsets value for the store and state directories is the way to go.  If I added this would it be something that would be accepted back into the tree?

Thanks!  -Tyson