Hi, Peter, On Fri, Mar 6, 2015, at 07:42 AM, Peter Simons wrote: > why don't you just add those tools into your user's profile?
That's a reasonable question, with two answers: The short answer is that the examples I gave weren't the best, they were just what sorted first in my list of Haskell development tools---the ones I believe must be instantiated in that environment in order to work correctly are ghc-mod and hoogle, though I may need to add an additional wrapper somewhere to get a functioning hoogle. Or I might not, which is the segue to my second answer: I am actually uncertain that things will work properly if I just include them in my user profile. I mean, yeah, they seem to work in simple cases, but so does taffybar---until you configure it, at which point you find out that you really need to add that to your environment using ghcWithPackages, because otherwise it can't recompile itself. So I find myself taking a defensive posture regarding other haskell tools. I understand that NixOS presents a very different vision of the OS to tools that make various presumptions, which require various strategies to rectify---and I understand that there's always going to be some costs, but if the benefits outweigh them, I'm willing to bear them. I have spent years trying to maintain this sort of deterministic build-and-configuration setup on top of Debian, and a facsimile can largely be achieved, but it is a lot of work. Still, trying to realize those benefits has been elusive: * the documentation about how to resolve some of these things is scattered around, * much of the haskell documentation seems out of date in various ways (not addressing haskell-ng, referencing apparently-deprecated things like myEnvFun, etc), * much of the documentation that's not out of date presumes significant familiarity with nix and/or how things used to be done. * common uses cases in other environments seem unaddressed (presuming I'm going to run my editor inside each different nix-shell environment is very un-emacs) * you also get to learn not just a new language, but a complex, intertwingled system of software management Looking at this, perhaps the contribution I can attempt is to try and turn my experiences into something of a guide for this, though it's not something I would trust myself to do solo, because, well, I'm still at the madly-flailing stage. Mike. _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev
