[Nix-dev] [ANN] Paket2Nix

[Karsten Gebbert]

Luca Bruno <lethalman88 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi thanks for your contribution. Any reason why you didn't use the existing
> dotnetPackages infrastructure?

Yes :)

1) When I started, I did not have a good-enough insight into what there is
already, though that has somewhat changed now. I have an open issue to integrate
parts of the existing code into Paket2Nix.

2) I chose a different strategy for making sure the project finds its
dependencies, namely by linking them into the places referenced in the project
XMLs. The current approach involves creating pkg-config files for each library,
and extensively patching the project files (which, incidentally, I still had to
do as well to turn off Paket itself).

3) I'm currently bouncing ideas back and forth in my mind how to create a
workflow that will simplify all of this. An approach I find appealing could be
to create composed environments where mono is packaged with all specified
libraries via a composed Global Assembly Cache. Then the workflow could become
similar to that of Haskell's, where we'd compose mono (or the coreclr) with the
packages we need. This requires an automated approach to bringing in NuGet deps,
which is definitely possible.