Hi guys, I just wanted to share some good news. Thanks to the heroic effort of @taku0 in [1], we have now vastly improved support for R in Nixpkgs. We support almost all of CRAN, and Nix can reliably install some 5816 packages:
http://hydra.cryp.to/jobset/nixpkgs/r-packages Furthermore, it's become easier to update the package set without losing manual changes to the build expressions since now auto-generated code and manually maintained code live in separate modules. There is one issue that concerns me, though: apparently, some R modules require a running X server for Tcl/Tk to build. We remedy this via xvfb-run(1) in pkgs/development/r-modules/generic-builder.nix, but this feels really odd. Even more so since xvfb-run has been reported to have trouble with more than one instance running in parallel, so we added another flock(1) hack on top of the xvfb-run hack. Personally, I don't know much about this whole X11 business, but it's hard to believe for me that the "solution" we've implemented right now is the best one possible. Does anyone, by any chance, have an idea how to improve that situation? Best regards Peter [1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/5078 _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
