Roadmap 2015

[Norman Feske]

Hi Emery,

thank you for considering my suggestion!

On 01/04/2015 07:48 PM, emery at ...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

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org

Genode Labs GmbH · Amtsgericht Dresden · HRB 28424 · Sitz Dresden
Geschäftsführer: Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske, Christian Helmuth