First, thanks to the folks who submitted the gnustep packages to nixpkgs. I have a nice little NeXT thing going with windomaker.
I’m trying to build GNUMail.app with nix. I created a package here, along with a couple of additional dependencies. I can build and install these packages just fine. However, when I go to actually run GNUMail, I get a segmentation fault.
$ GNUMail
2020-06-30 23:02:41.853 .GNUMail-wrapped[6177:6177] styleoffsets ... guessing offsets
2020-06-30 23:02:41.853 .GNUMail-wrapped[6177:6177] styleoffsets ... guessing offsets
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
I’ve tried to debug further, but I’ve been having trouble getting debug symbols. I tried doing this:
$ nix-build -E 'with import <nixos> {}; enableDebugging gnumail'
$ result/bin/GNUMail; sudo coredumpctl debug -1
However, I still don’t have any symbols. I am new to nix and not sure I did this correctly. I had to modify the parameter list of the gnumail function to accept stdenv, but I don’t use it, and gnustep’s version of callPackage appears to use its own clang-based stdenv, so I think that has something to do with it.
Speaking a bit more broadly, I think the current framework could handle the GNUstep directory better. I’d like to get the openapp and debugapp commands to work; currently, these are provided by the gnustep.make package, but they only search the GNUstep/Applications directory of that derivation. With the way nix works, I have an almost perfect GNUstep directory in ~/.nix-profile/lib/GNUstep. I say almost because some of the symlinks are a level too high:
$ cd ~/.nix-profile/lib; for dir in GNUstep/*; do printf '%s -> ' "$dir"; readlink -f $dir; done
GNUstep/Applications -> /nix/store/sf7ry0zyjilr3gb101kwdl258alqfa2b-user-environment/lib/GNUstep/Applications
GNUstep/ApplicationSupport -> /nix/store/31xpsi4270vwp00m12qs5ld134w4r5bn-gnumail-1.3.0/lib/GNUstep/ApplicationSupport
GNUstep/Bundles -> /nix/store/83gd5khihqplc8zf0fvig2rp6hrinkiq-gnustep-back-0.27.0/lib/GNUstep/Bundles
GNUstep/Fonts -> /nix/store/83gd5khihqplc8zf0fvig2rp6hrinkiq-gnustep-back-0.27.0/lib/GNUstep/Fonts
GNUstep/Frameworks -> /nix/store/sf7ry0zyjilr3gb101kwdl258alqfa2b-user-environment/lib/GNUstep/Frameworks
Some of the links, like the one for Bundles, should be pointing to a profile, that can be populated by multiple packages, similar to how bin is handled. If it’s possible to enforce that, and provide a system I think the current solution with wrapping each binary would no longer be necessary and openapp will just work. What’s a good way to go about implementing this?