Shea Levy <[email protected]> writes: >>> It’s not Nixpkgs, it’s Emacs. :-) So it has its own channel, at >>> <http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/emacs-trunk/channel/latest/MANIFEST>. >>> But you can’t really use it easily. >> I don't understand the distinction. Is keeping it in its own channel >> comparable to the way PPAs (Personal Package Archives) work in Ubuntu? > > Not quite. Nixpkgs is a package repository (well, a package recipe > repository), emacs is a text editor, and hydra is a continuous build > system that, among other things, makes its build results available via > a nix channel. AFAIK, the primary purpose of building nixpkgs with > hydra is to have the latest packages easily downloadable for nixpkgs > users. AFAIK, the primary purpose of building emacs with hydra is to > do continuous integration testing of the latest emacs source code, > with the existence of the emacs-trunk channel being just a happy > side-effect.
Oh, OK; so the whole purpose is different. I guess what I don't understand is why the Emacs hydra build .nix file isn't also used by the emacs-snapshot package in nixpkgs, since that package is extremely out of date. Is it just discouraged to package prerelease versions of software in general? If it's merely a question of stability then it shouldn't be a problem; the Emacs 24 pretest is very stable. > In the example in the manual, the path downloaded corresponds to the > highest-versioned package named 'firefox' in the nixpkgs repo. In > other words, nix has access to a nix expression that defines that > firefox, it tries to build it, and sees its already built. In your > example, you haven't told nix where to find the nix expression > defining emacs, so nix has no way to see that the path you downloaded > corresponds to 'emacs', so you have to specify the path directly. > Trying 'nix-env -i emacs' will just build the version of emacs > specified in nixpkgs, which is obviously not the snapshot version you > downloaded. Thanks, that makes sense. -Phil _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
