[Nix-dev] ntfs-3g in trunk appears broken

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

Tony White wrote:

> I just tried checking out trunk to update nixos from it and got a failure from :
> 
> https://svn.nixos.org/repos/nix/nixpkgs/trunk/pkgs/misc/ntfs-3g/default.nix
> 
> The error was that the archive could not be found on the server, I
> think that the ntfs-3g people must have deleted it.

Yes, it's bad when people delete old source releases :-(

I've commited your update to version 2009.4.4.

> Is this the right place to mention this or is the bug tracker preferred?

The bug tracker is good in principle, but I think I'm the only one who gets
emails from the bug tracker.

> Is anyone able to show me how to add fall back sources like
> alternative mirrors to expressions?
> I can see that :
> 
>   src = fetchurl {
>     url = "${meta.homepage}/${name}.tgz";
>     sha256 = "bcd39ebe90541f512e605b62911f14f6107239c4ff032d56d5da3dc3c05e0d0f";
>   };
> 
> Is how the expression is used to call the src. Is there a way to add
> one or two other sources to the expression as a fallback if the
> archive has been removed from the server?

Yes, you can say "fetchurl { urls = [ http://url1 http://url2 ... ]; }".

Also, we have a mechanism for mirroring.  fetchurl automatically tries to
download files by hash from http://nixos.org/tarballs/sha256/<hash>.  There is a
script that copies all tarballs that appear in Nixpkgs to that mirror, but I
don't run it very frequently (basically only for every "stable" Nixpkgs
release).  Maybe I should do it in a cronjob...

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/