nix on gentoo howto

TL;DR

Getting nix on gentoo (same steps):

install nix from gentoo main tree: emerge nix
enable nix-daemon service:
- on systemd: systemctl enable nix-daemon
- on openrc: rc-update add nix-daemon
relogin your user (it will source environment and profile update)
run nix-channel --update

Ready!

More fun commands

install a package: nix-env -iA nixpkgs.firefox
uninstall a package: nix-env -e nixpkgs.firefox
start a new shell with only specified package(s) in environment: nix-shell --pure -p chromium

More words

haskell overlay for gentoo had a sys-apps/nix package manager for a long time. I bumped it’s version a few times but never actually tried to use it.

WARNING: I’ve been using nix only for a week and wrote like 3 .nix packages for a few binaries and libraries. Take all I write here with a grain of salt.

Nix is not gentoo-specific at all. Nix is not even haskell-specific. The implementation language is C++, Perl and Nix Expression Language.

Nix tries to solve (among other things) an interesting problem of software distribution: make packages (binaries + everything else) runnable on machines other than the one package was built on.

Nix tracks precise dependencies of packages it was built against down to libc. Once you’ve changed glibc you need to rebuild all dependent packages.

Every build gets installed into it’s own unique prefix under /nix/store:

$ LANG=C ls -l /nix/store/ | egrep '^d.*(glibc|firefox)'
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root      36 Jan  1  1970 49hz360b2i923wg8dcccwlbqc8yv4yii-glibc-2.24-dev
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root      14 Jan  1  1970 iyvj5p6xq12f5b24cjiqi4pphsvna0cc-glibc-iconv-2.24
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root      14 Jan  1  1970 jkas4im9rr89n86h8p4sh3p6j3zdapcr-glibc-2.24-bin
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root      46 Jan  1  1970 kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root      22 Jan  1  1970 w74ads27sakc524hfffi8iz4g8qdcill-firefox-unwrapped-50.1.0
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root      44 Jan  1  1970 xsqz79bzclgrgnnlffp3qa0g4wnbcrp1-firefox-50.1.0

And then gets symlinked into user’s environment:

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.firefox
replacing old ‘firefox-50.1.0’
installing ‘firefox-50.1.0’
building path(s) ‘/nix/store/7ckh9ldic5fdlcqjjjpxadbya9lcj2gg-user-environment’
created 85 symlinks in user environment

$ type -P firefox
/home/testie/.nix-profile/bin/firefox

$ ls -l /home/testie/.nix-profile/bin/firefox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 70 Jan  1  1970 /home/testie/.nix-profile/bin/firefox -> /nix/store/xsqz79bzclgrgnnlffp3qa0g4wnbcrp1-firefox-50.1.0/bin/firefox

$ ldd /nix/store/w74ads27sakc524hfffi8iz4g8qdcill-firefox-unwrapped-50.1.0/lib/firefox-50.1.0/firefox
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007fffd9966000)
libpthread.so.0 => /nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f5a3f720000)
libdl.so.2 => /nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f5a3f51c000)
libstdc++.so.6 => /nix/store/jar52969wyf10sh2wj62ipfjiw7xaq2j-gcc-5.4.0-lib/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f5a3f1a4000)
libm.so.6 => /nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f5a3ee9f000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f5a3ec89000)
libc.so.6 => /nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f5a3e8eb000)
/nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f5a3f93d000)

$ LANG=C readelf -a /nix/store/w74ads27sakc524hfffi8iz4g8qdcill-firefox-unwrapped-50.1.0/lib/firefox-50.1.0/firefox | grep RUNPATH
0x000000000000001d (RUNPATH)            Library runpath: [/nix/store/kk71vkqipf30qc165718jmp0s8cggn2y-glibc-2.24/lib:/nix/store/jar52969wyf10sh2wj62ipfjiw7xaq2j-gcc-5.4.0-lib/lib]

Unique interpreter and RUNPATH injection trick allows binaries just work without changes in environment.

That allows having multiple firefox versions (potentially built agains different glibc versions) coexist at the same time and not interfere with others.

From perspective of a gentoo user nix feels like a very fast binary distribution. Nix does not need to perform heavyweight file system operations when packages are installed or uninstalled. It’s just a matter of unpacking a couple of archives into new locations (or reusing existing prebuilt packages).

As a gentoo dev I feel .nix files are almost like .ebuilds. But .nix files are quite unfriendly to a user who does not deeply understand Nix Expression Language.

Overriding CFLAGS / LDFLAGS system-wide is a challenge. It’s not a fundamental problem of nix. Just a matter of exposing a few hooks to users (at a price of losing binary cache).

Writing new packages

There is quite a few packages still missing in nixpkgs repository. Let’s see how easy it is to add a new package locally. I’m used to lv tool (it’s a more, less and most sibling).

To get it accessible I had to write the following files:

# cat ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix 
{
  packageOverrides = pkgs:
    let
      callPackage = pkgs.lib.callPackageWith (pkgs // self);
      self = rec {
        lv = callPackage ./lv/default.nix {};
      };
  in self;
}

# cat ~/.nixpkgs/lv/default.nix 
{stdenv, fetchpatch, fetchurl, ncurses}:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "lv-4.51";

  src = fetchurl {
    # used to be http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~nrt/freeware/lv451.tar.gz
    # Picking new mirror:
    url = http://distfiles.gentoo.org/distfiles/lv451.tar.gz;
    sha256 = "1kwb2mqavhghmixjyp8zjjc2ivx6r2cklb2z8dnvrgcz20kjxkg1";
  };

  # fix empty /bin/ recreation
  patches = [(fetchpatch {
    name = "lv-4.51-gentoo.patch";
    url = "https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/plain/app-text/lv/files/lv-4.51-gentoo.patch";
    sha256 = "1s4d9gdmh2q8zr2bpi8ack648zpjz8i5wa0wf3bqd5lp90gaflx4";
  })];

  configureScript = "src/configure";

  buildInputs = [ ncurses ];

  meta = {
    description = "Powerful Multilingual File Viewer";
    homepage = http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~nrt/lv/;
    license = stdenv.lib.licenses.gpl2;
    platforms = stdenv.lib.platforms.gnu; # random choice
  };
}

The lv/default.nix looks straightforward: it’s a “function” of one table-like argument with 4 key-value pairs with names stdenv, fetchpatch, fetchurl, ncurses.

Local callPackage function picks fields with the same names from a table merged of pkgs and self tables and passes them to lv/default.nix. Here nixpkgs exploit lazy evaluation nature of Nix Expression Language to allow user to override, say, ncurses or any other “function” argument.

Overriding CFLAGS

How easy would it be to override CFLAGS? There is a hack to do it at least on per-package level.

# cat ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix 
{
  packageOverrides = pkgs:
    let
      callPackage = pkgs.lib.callPackageWith (pkgs // self);
      self = rec {
        lv = callPackage ./lv/default.nix {};

        # CFLAGS tweak example:
        sudo = pkgs.sudo.overrideDerivation (o: {CFLAGS = ["-O0"];});
      };
    in self;
}