Hi Emery,
thank you for considering my suggestion!
On 01/04/2015 07:48 PM, emery@...261... wrote:
I think you are right to point to Nix on Noux, and I will make it my next priority. Even if it were practical to reuse legacy package expressions from Nixpkgs it would be much easier if there was a mature Noux Nix running natively rather than going through a lot of cross-compilation and bootstrapping on a Linux host first.
I think that besides enabling package management on Genode, bringing the Nix package manager to Noux would have a very welcome side effect with respect to the overall theme outlined in my initial posting (making Genode usable). I expect that you will hit several limitations of Noux (e.g., functional gaps or performance issues) on your way. So stressing Noux by your line of work would pressure us to fix those issues and make Noux better for everyone. In this spirit, I encourage you to share any trouble of using Noux with us. ;-)
Getting Nix to compile should be straightforward, but building and storing outputs will take some consideration and probably a few design iterations to work well on Genode, though I'm certain it will yield some novel improvements over POSIX Nix. I don't yet have any concrete ideas on what changes would be made, but I will know more as I inspect Noux and Nix.
I agree. From reading the Nix documentation, I even got the impression that some of the "quirky" aspects of Nix (i.e., the need of the Nix daemon) stem from Linux' limitation of having one global VFS. On Genode, we don't have this limitation as each Noux instance can have its own VFS. I am curios to see how this may benefit the use of Nix on our platform.
Cheers Norman