[Nix-dev] Newbie experiences with NixOS

[Gergö Barany]

Thanks to everyone for their helpful answers! Very nice community :-)

On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 20:07:28 +0200, Domen Kožar wrote:
> Try  nixpkgs.config.clementine.spotify = false;

Thanks to everyone who pointed that out. It doesn't work for me on the 14.04
branch, but I'll believe everyone that it works on unstable :-) I might have
to switch.

> $ nix-prefetch-url
> http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip

Ha, cool. Thanks again to you and all the others who pointed me to
nix-prefetch-url.


On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 19:16:40 +0100, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
> 1. ‘nix-env -i ghc’ worked because ‘-i’ resolves by package name, not an
> attribute name. It more-or-less makes a rough guess at what you mean by
> ‘ghc’. Using the attirbute names in preferable because it's not
> ambiguous.

Ah! I had wondered about the differing names in the package list. Will stick
to attribute names then. Sorry to say that this is not clear to newbies :-(

> It seems you managed to hit quite a combination of problems! Pretty much
> all the packaging problems come from the fact that we need more people
> reporting problems and people fixing problems. I hope you'll try NixOS
> again in the future and have a better experience.

Sure. Will keep trying to break stuff!
 

On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 20:37:58 +0200, Vladimír Čunát wrote:
> On 09/09/2014 07:24 PM, Gergö Barany wrote:
> >- I found it puzzling that the package channel is to be set imperatively on
> >   the command line rather than in the configuration file. This breaks the
> >   nice property of the entire configuration being in one or more config
> >   files.
> 
> I think the decision when to update the channel(s) needs to be done
> imperatively, as it is inherently impure and in many cases one does
> *not* want to update the channel (one may not want to update
> everything because of some minor config change).

I agree about *updating* imperatively, but the URL of the desired channel is
a declarative piece of data, I think.

> Personally, I use "man configuration.nix" for that purpose.

Ah! I could have thought of trying that...


Thanks again, you have been very helpful!

Gergo