My Experience with Nix on OS X

Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by ris on Monday May 30, 2016 @04:51PM (#11803118)

I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily.

If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by _query on Monday May 30, 2016 @04:56PM (#11803142)

Good suggestion. Looks like travis already has an OS X build environment[0]. So technically it should be doable :)

[0]: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/osx-ci-environment/

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by hk__2 on Monday May 30, 2016 @05:15PM (#11803246)

Yes Travis CI supports OS X and we used it for a while for Homebrew.

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by Ericson2314 on Monday May 30, 2016 @06:26PM (#11803574)

The real solution is we need to use our CI, Hydra, to build all PRs.

Now Travis doing this is interesting because last time people looked there was no hosting for OS X that wasn't ridiculously expensive, so we've literally had people donate Mac Minis.

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by rokgarbas on Monday May 30, 2016 @05:18PM (#11803262)

the major reason for poor package support is low number of osx users (hydra - nix build farm - builds binaries also for osx).

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by CJefferson on Monday May 30, 2016 @05:37PM (#11803361)

I've started looking at this. Part of the problem is that nix wants (reasonably) to do "everything itself", including (for example) bundling the OS X SDKs itself.

At the moment that's broken (the 10.9 SDK is installed in 10.11, then links against some 10.11 libraries, which is blocking mplayer). I don't have the knowledge to fix it.

homebrew and fink have had the same problem (deciding when to link against system libraries and when to try to rebuild) -- hopefully nix will get over this hurdle.

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by davexunit on Monday May 30, 2016 @06:02PM (#11803474)

The correct answer for Nix is to never link against a library provided by the system. Nix provides its own bootstrap binaries and it must be done that way for the sake of reproducibility.

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by CJefferson on Monday May 30, 2016 @06:14PM (#11803520)

This is exactly what Nix does, but not all libraries are currently 'Nixified', and the ones which are aren't consistent.

Apple doesn't help this -- they want you to just install xcode and the most recent SDK and nothing else.

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by matt4077 on Monday May 30, 2016 @07:59PM (#11803861)

well, there's xcode-select to chose the SDK you want which kinda implies the availability of multiple – currently for example swift 2.2 and 3.0.

I'm tempted by the "1-environment" idea but homebrew has done such an excellent job in comparison to fink/port, I';; stay loyal. Also wondering if those two projects couldn't profit from some code sharing?

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by mseri on Monday May 30, 2016 @06:01PM (#11803469)

Is it possible to avoid bundling old sdk and use the one installed instead by xcode instead? Or it would require too much troubles?

EDIT: completed sentence

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by Ericson2314 on Monday May 30, 2016 @06:28PM (#11803584)

We used to be more impure on osX, but that was also hard to maintain so a bunch of work was done over the past year.

Better CI + critical mass of maintainers (and that's just a few more) is all we need now.

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Re:My Experience with Nix on OS X by voltagex_ on Tuesday May 31, 2016 @12:11AM (#11804505)

Out of interest, how'd you get your OS X builds set up? I had to do quite a lot of searching before I found a company [2] willing to lend PureDarwin [1] a box for a while.

[1]: https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin

[2]: https://www.macstadium.com/ (thanks!)

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