[Nix-dev] Providing Debian, Arch etc. packages counterproductive?

[zimbatm]

What does the deb exactly contain and take care of ?
I'm not sure of the boundary between the system package manager and nix.
For example once nix is installed I would expect the `nix` binary to be
managed by it, but if it's provided by the system package as well then it's
possible to have two versions installed. This in turn might leads to
confused users who just upgraded `nix` but are still having the old version.

On the other end, it would be nice if installing nix was just a matter of
running `curl -L https://nixos.org/nix-current/$(uname)-$(arch).tar.bz2 |
tar xa -C /nix && ln -s /nix/bin/nix-env /usr/local/bin` and then setup the
profile. But then making this cross-platform is going to be a challenge.


On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 at 18:42 Hajo Möller <dasjoe at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 09/22/2015 11:35 AM, Thomas Hunger wrote:
> > I can think of two solutions 1) make the packages set up nix correctly
> > so nix-env is usable out of the box and 2) Remove all custom packages
> > and tell people to use the installer script.
>
> I'm strongly against 2), as I don't think curl-ing into sh is a good
> idea at all. There was a HN discussion about (not) doing it two years
> ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650987
>
> A more recent example comes from chef's blog:
>
> https://www.chef.io/blog/2015/07/16/5-ways-to-deal-with-the-install-sh-curl-pipe-bash-problem/
>
> Please at least print the script before executing it, pipe it through
> moreutil's vipe? vipe may not be available and requires perl, so that's
> not good, either...
>
> While I haven't looked at the .deb packages so far, there may be a way
> to have launchpad build the .debs and provide a PPA.
> I saw Eelco Dolstra maintains the .debs, thanks for that! When I needed
> nix to look at how the manual gets built, I just grabbed a .deb.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Hajo Möller
> _______________________________________________
> nix-dev mailing list
> nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20150922/82365dd4/attachment.html