Hi all, This weekend, I wanted to try out the stdenv-updates branch. I was prepared for it to take some time to build, as my build-expression builds everything for all my systems, including a livecd, and as such it covers quite a lot of dependencies.
But instead of just having to wait for a while, the whole experience was a lot less pleasant, as the build process errored out every hour or so, because of missing source downloads. As I was not present the whole time, but only check/fix/restarted occasionally, I'm not even halfway done yet :( I think it's important to be able to build nixos/nixpkgs fully from source, or at least know upfront if any download-related errors will occur. I can think of 3 ways which could improve the current situation. a) --download-only option for nix-build That way, before attempting long builds, I can make sure I have all the sources, and don't even need an internet connection during the real build. b) have sources available from nixos.org This can be in a channel, or some other way. I understand using a channel would mean these downloads would always be tried on nixos.org first, while we probably want the original source tried first, so perhaps fetchurl can be extended to try nixos.org as a last-resort mirror somehow. c) have hydra try from-scratch (almost empty store) builds every few weeks and report to the list so maintainers can fix/look for sources elsewhere. Would any of these solutions be easy to implement? Or are there other options I didn't consider? Thanks, Mathijs PS: One of the main offenders are the sources for the many versions of iwlwifi. The official site for these, intellinuxwireless.org is down, and seems to have been so since july 2010 [1]. I found most of the sources mirrored elsewhere (mainly fedora), but an overview of all most recent versions seems lacking. I haven't investigated the status of this any further, as I don't own such hardware, but relying on old mirrored copies without active development will probably hurt some day. [1] http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110801000000*/http://intellinuxwireless.org _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
