BTRFS-Assistant

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I’m interested in learning how to build a package that can be used in my nixos or home manager config, but I’m not sure how to do it. The package is btrfs-assistant and I believe @dalto is the primary developer on it. Does anyone have a tutorial I could follow to continue on my nix learning journey?

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This is already being packaged

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Well, that’s awesome. I swear when I last looked, it wasn’t available.

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It’s not merged, yet. There’s some stuff that’s hard coded in the source code that I’m trying to make the derivation support so that it doesn’t get incorrect runtime behavior.

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It looks like your work is about to be part of nixpkgs. Nice work @khaneliman .

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I just did a test build of your package nix build "nixpkgs/7f6f891#btrfs-assistant on NixOS Gnome and it appears to be working; however, when I try to create a new snapper config it fails with the error “Failure (org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown).” I’m wondering if this is due to snapper being optional? Is there a parameter I need to pass during the build to enable snapper? Or maybe it has to do with running a QT application in Gnome?

Thanks.

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From my testing, snapper’s implementation in NixOS is pretty underwhelming and not on parity with other linux distros. Snapper - should .snapshots subvolumes be created automatically? - #3 by claes example post. I had to basically describe my snapper config in my nixos config and you can just use Btrfs Assistant currently to browse and create snapshots but not configs.

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I wonder if the paths for snapper and bash should be moved to the btrfs-assistant config file.

The nix packaging would still need to change those paths in the config but it wouldn’t have to patch the source.

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