On Thursday, November 28, 2013 07:31:29 PM Roelof Wobben wrote: > Im now 3 days at work to make cinnamon-desktop working so Nixos can have > Cinnamon 2.x It looks like to me the configure and make files are really > broken. On make I see several error messages about missing and not found > error messages. > > Now I wonder if there is a experienced packager of coder who is willing to > be a sort of mentor so we get the packages working.
I don't think there are experienced packagers who are *unwilling* to help. However, everyone has a todo list and a real life that gets in the way. If you want assistance, you have to be patient. If you want things to happen faster, you have to be ready to get your hands dirty and reach under the hood. If there's a systematic problem with configure/makefiles, it makes sense to invest some time into looking at the source. These files may be big, but they certainly are rather simple. You have to realize that the build errors you are getting aren't reported by nix, they are produced by these files. When you look at the sources, it becomes quite clear what went wrong. Is it because a path is wrong or hardcoded? Which env var/configure parameter influeces the searched paths? Is there some undocumented(but very obiouvs) var/parameter that you can set to point the buildsystem in the right direction? Now that you know what went wrong, you can reformulate your question like "what is the best practice to do X in nixpkgs?" where X could be passing an ENV var to the builder, patching a makefile or other simple technical question. Such questions can be quickly answered by grepping the source, or looking at similar packages(or packages with similar deps). If you ask simple, technical and nix-related questions in the channel, you are also much more likely to get a quick response, because people often just know the answer. It is very unfortunate that cinnamon has problems in the buildsystem department. There are large (and larger) software suites which follow the best practice packaging, such as X11, KDE, and thus require very little or no hacks and sometimes are even autopackaged by scripts. If you feel strongly about Cinnamon, you might also want to do the right thing and fix their buildsystem instead/in adddition and contribute your fixes upstream. _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
