[Nix-dev] Getting Nix to work on MacOS

[Konrad Hinsen]

Hi everyone,

I have just started to look at Nix seriously, which means first of all
trying to get it to work. I started with nix-0.16, which I installed
on my Mac running under MacOS X 10.6.8. No problem at all with the installation,
and subscribing to nixpkgs-unstable seemed to work fine as well.

Then I tried

  nix-env -b -v -i hello

to get something simple installed. The package "hello" exists in binary on the
server, so I expected this to be a quick install. What I get is a long list
of messages "evaluation file ....", ending with

  building path(s) `/nix/store/58f4b8n6kyxvkvy77m3n23ywgk6z1ifb-user-environment'
  created 0 symlinks in user environment
  scanning for references inside `/nix/store/58f4b8n6kyxvkvy77m3n23ywgk6z1ifb-user-environment'

and then nothing. I can't see anything that could have been installed, but I can't find any error message either.

When I leave out the -b, nix starts building lots of packages from
source and ultimately fails when building openssl:

cc -I. -I.. -I../include  -fPIC -fno-common -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -DL_ENDIAN -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_PART_WORDS -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DRMD160_ASM -DAES_ASM -DWHIRLPOOL_ASM -c  -o x86cpuid.o x86cpuid.s
x86cpuid.s:7:suffix or operands invalid for `push'
x86cpuid.s:8:suffix or operands invalid for `push'
x86cpuid.s:9:suffix or operands invalid for `push'
x86cpuid.s:10:suffix or operands invalid for `push'
x86cpuid.s:12:suffix or operands invalid for `pushf'
x86cpuid.s:13:suffix or operands invalid for `pop'
...


Does anyone have a suggestions how to check what went wrong, in particular with the binary installation?

Thanks in advance,
  Konrad.