[Nix-dev] Nix expressions for channel nixpkgs-unstable

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 26/03/12 15:52, Konrad Hinsen wrote:

> My first idea was to use the Subversion repository for nixpkgs, but it
> seems that the channel has only a subset of those packages, and not
> necessarily uses the same versions. For example, when I install
> python-numpy from nixpkgs-unstable I get Python 2.6, whereas
> all-packages.nix in the repository defines python=python27.

Thanks, I've fixed this.  The problem was that Nixpkgs also contains packages
for Python 2.6 (the python26Packages attribute in all-packages.nix).  So if you
do "nix-env -i python-numpy", nix-env won't know whether to pick the Python 2.6
or 2.7 build, since the version numbers of those two python-numpy builds are the
same.  I've now removed python26Packages from visibility in nix-env, so "nix-env
-i python-numpy" should always give you the Python 2.7 version.

It's always possible to disambiguate by using the -A flag to select a package by
attribute name, e.g.:

  $ nix-env -iA pythonPackages.numpy

> Alternatively, is there a simple way to install packages using a
> source code version of nixpkgs, rather than subscribing to the
> channel?

You can do a checkout of the Subversion repository of Nixpkgs.  However, the
Nixpkgs channel is *also* a "source code version"; it's just a copy of some
revision of the Nixpkgs repository, along with a pointer to pre-built binaries.

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