Hi All Apologies if the things I am asking are off-topic for this list. I know of no other nix-related mailing list, but I am open to suggestions where to better post my questions.
I am trying to evaluate using nix as deployment system on top of debian gnu/linux for software we write for in-house use. Unfortunately I cannot use /nix as the nix store path because I don't have root permissions on the relevant machine(s). I could get our admin to create me a symlink /nix to somewhere but giving me a 'real' directory (which probably means a dedicated partition) would require lots of arguing. So that means I cannot use pre-built binaries which makes things a bit slow... Since this is a test/evaluation system only, wouldn't it make sense to relax the strict no-symlink policy in such cases? It would be ideal if I could configure this somewhere when building nix from source. I am willing to patch the nix sources if someone could give me a hint where this check is implemented. Another question w.r.t. to the nixpkgs (I am using the the current version form the svn repo): I noticed that the first time I 'nix-env -i some-package' nix downloads and installs linux kernel headers. Now, what it installs is version 2.6.23.16, but the kernel my stuff will run under is 2.6.18. I am not sure but I think this is potentially unsafe; hence I have changed my nix expression to use the same kernel version as I have in my host system. This doesn't make a great difference to me at the moment because I have to compile everything from source anyway (see above) but it could make one in the future so I am asking for your opinion on this. Yet another thought that occurred to me is: what if I forget about nixpkgs and use nix /only/ for our own stuff. Can I write my own nix expression and import the OS stuff (compiler tool chain, headers, etc) from outside of the nix store? This would be very 'impure' of course, and would limit reproducability on other machines, but it might be easier to start experimenting with. Any opinions, warnings, hints? Cheers Ben _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.cs.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
