[Nix-dev] On the sad state of remote-builds for the end-user

[Matthias Beyer]

Hi,

I'm a bit angry right now because things do not just work.

I tried for almost three hours now to build my system on a remote machine.
It took 1 hour to build the packages (yesod, yesod-persistent and some more
dependencies of yesod and git-annex, see #16210) and then I couldn't download
them from the remote machine because of some signatures missing.

I tried to use nix-serve, but again... signatures missing. I generated a
keypair, did a nix-push to some directory, but then I couldn't download the
packages because the private key wasn't in the right path or something like
this. This is by the way completely undocumented (the manpage tells you
something of a *sysconfdir* ... but leaves unspecified what that is) - only the
error message will tell you that it is /etc/nix (which isn't present if you
install nix on a non-nixos system... leading to more confusion). After putting
the private key into this path it starts complaining about the rights of the
file (either a "everyone is able to read this and that shouldn't be the
case"-like error message or some "Cannot read key" because there are too few
rights...) ... and again: completely undocumented what rights are sufficient
(this time not even the error message tells you what rights are to be expected).

Can someone please provide a tutorial on how to build packages or a whole system
on another machine? I do not want to mess around with keys and such ... I just
want to build my system/package on that other machine... I have access via SSH
(key) and that's it.

I really don't want to rebuild all this haskell stuff every two weeks on my
notebook... I still wonder why it isn't available as binary substitute...
someone on IRC pointed out that there were changes in the haskell
infrastructure... I don't understand why that means that substitutes are no
longer available (and I really do not want to have to understand it... I just
want to _use_ it).

Please don't feel offended by this mail. I'm just really frustrated right now.

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

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