[Nix-dev] Preference for building from source

[Daniel Peebles]

As far as the particular examples of Eclipse and Gradle, I think the issue
is that building java packages (especially big complicated ones like those)
is currently rather painful in Nix. Unlike many other language ecosystems,
we don't have a wealth of prepackaged libraries and dependencies for the
JVM ecosystem, so unless you have a fairly small self-contained project,
it's quite painful to build a new java project.

Of course we should improve that, but in the meantime we might as well
package the jars.


On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 8:26 AM, Eelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra at logicblox.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 08/01/16 11:26, Rok Garbas wrote:
>
> >     Building from source is always possible. That's what Hydra.nixos.org
> >     <http://Hydra.nixos.org>
> >     does for you. The binaries from there are used iff the build
> >     instructions are exactly the same as what is available already.
> >
> >
> > I think Juho (awesome name by the way!) was trying to figure out what
> the is the
> > general policy of nixpkgs expressions.
> >
> > I would say we are pragmatic there. We prefer to build from source and
> use
> > system libraries, but if this takes to much time to implement we are
> also ok
> > with reverting to building from binaries (or partially built binaries)
> from
> > upstream.
>
> I would state it a bit stronger: using binaries should only be done as a
> last
> resort. E.g. we use binaries for bootstrapping GHC because there really is
> no
> feasible way around that. But they should be avoided in general because
> they
> cannot really be audited or reproduced, let alone modified.
>
> --
> Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/
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