Consider fixing the Nixpkgs package

[Ruud van Asseldonk]

Hi all,

I want to try Urbit, so I started looking for a way to install it with
Nix. There is a package named "urbit" in Nixpkgs [1], but it does not
build, and it is outdated.

I took a look to see if I could update/fix it quickly, and I was
pleasantly surprised to see that Urbit itself now builds with Nix.
However, this ironically makes it a bit of a challenge to package it in
Nixpkgs. From what I can tell, it should be possible to copy the package
definitions in //nix/pkgs into Nixpkgs with fairly minimal adjustments,
but because it’s an entire set of interdependent packages, this is not a
simple package bump. Before I go and spend a lot of time trying to make
this work, has anybody else tried to fix the package?

Kind regards,

Ruud van Asseldonk

[1]:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/f214b8c9455e90b70bafd4ed9a58d448c243e8bb/pkgs/misc/urbit/default.nix

[Jake Miller]

I made an attempt a while back but gave up because of the massive headache dealing with haskell-nix turned out to be. Since we've ripped all of that out now it might not be too bad (though my work won't be of much help of course). Most of the reason for the complicated pkg definitions stemmed from problems with cross compilation IIRC.

There are a few nix groups on urbit who might be willing to help out too (join ~middev/dotfiles for one). So if you're willing to take the lead on it you'd at least have some support!

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[Christian Crawford]

everything is statically linked anyway, so the value add from integrating it into your nix distro is dubious at best. you can definitely just nix-shell into urbit/pkg/urbit and build it from there, but my nix foo is bad and so would have little else to say

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[Jake Miller]

It's nice to have in the same way that a 'brew install urbit' is a nice to have. There are also a fair amount of people who use nix as a package manager on other distros, including macOS. Kind of a pain in the ass to have to clone the repo and build it all the time.

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 9:16 PM, Christian Crawford <c.craw...@gmail.com> wrote:

everything is statically linked anyway, so the value add from integrating it into your nix distro is dubious at best. you can definitely just nix-shell into urbit/pkg/urbit and build it from there, but my nix foo is bad and so would have little else to say

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 6:46 PM Jake Miller <jraydermiller@gmail.com> wrote:

I made an attempt a while back but gave up because of the massive headache dealing with haskell-nix turned out to be. Since we've ripped all of that out now it might not be too bad (though my work won't be of much help of course). Most of the reason for the complicated pkg definitions stemmed from problems with cross compilation IIRC.

There are a few nix groups on urbit who might be willing to help out too (join ~middev/dotfiles for one). So if you're willing to take the lead on it you'd at least have some support!

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 3:49 PM, Ruud van Asseldonk <dev@veniogames.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I want to try Urbit, so I started looking for a way to install it with Nix. There is a package named "urbit" in Nixpkgs [1], but it does not build, and it is outdated.

I took a look to see if I could update/fix it quickly, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Urbit itself now builds with Nix. However, this ironically makes it a bit of a challenge to package it in Nixpkgs. From what I can tell, it should be possible to copy the package definitions in //nix/pkgs into Nixpkgs with fairly minimal adjustments, but because it’s an entire set of interdependent packages, this is not a simple package bump. Before I go and spend a lot of time trying to make this work, has anybody else tried to fix the package?

Kind regards,

Ruud van Asseldonk

[1]:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/f214b8c9455e90b70bafd4ed9a58d448c243e8bb/pkgs/misc/urbit/default.nix

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