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

[Brian McKenna]

Hi Matthias,

I remember a similar conversation we had a few months ago. If you use
sudo, you can skip the signature checking:

https://www.mail-archive.com/nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl/msg18560.html

It's not ideal - but does this same method get you unstuck?

On 14 June 2016 at 01:19, Matthias Beyer <mail at beyermatthias.de> wrote:
> 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
>
> Proudly sent with mutt.
> Happily signed with gnupg.
>
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