Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] nix: add a simple flake nix shell

[Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93@gmail.com>]

On 12/4/23 9:01 PM, Vincenzo Palazzo wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 5, 2023 at 2:54 AM Jeff Law <jeffreyalaw@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Distro build procedures are not something the GCC project generally gets
>> involved with.
> 
> I see, but to me, this do not look like a distro build procedure,
> because you can use
> with any kind of system (OSX/UNIX) by using nix.


But you can do the same with various other distro build procedures too?

e.g. Gentoo Prefix allows you to install a full-blown gentoo anywhere
you like, "by using portage".

But also by the same token, I can just install pacman or rpm or dpkg on
any system, and use the recipe executor just without requiring a
database of installed packages.


> I disagree with you just because my patch is not building a package
> but is just giving
> an agnostic way to develop with GCC. OFC is most useful with NixOs because
> it does not have apt or pacman or any other kind of package manager.


I'm not entirely sure what this statement means (unless you are saying
that nix isn't a package manager and NixOS doesn't have any package
manager)?

But I'd actually go one step further. It looks like this "flake.nix"
file is the NixOS specific equivalent of a README.md which says "to
install the software, you must first install XX, YY, and ZZ using your
system package manager. Often they will have names such as XX-devel and
suchlike".

Which for GCC would be https://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html --
this page actually lists a bunch of things I don't see mentioned in your
"flake.nix" file so I suspect that it won't, in fact, produce a good
development environment for developing GCC.

I don't think it's the job of the GCC maintainers to maintain special
snowflake integrations with niche linux distros, whether those
integrations work or not. But, if it *was* the job of the GCC
maintainers, perhaps it would be better to make a script:

`tools/setup-development-env.sh $distro`

which could abstract away all of this for any distro, not just a niche one.


-- 
Eli Schwartz