Is it possible to convert a deb package into nix drv automatically?

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I find that there is some example here:

Which means it is possible by human to convert a deb package handly, but I’m still wondering is it possible to make things automatically?

I know that it could be very hard, but I still want to figure out what the hardest part is, and if it is possible to be solved. if not, then why?

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I think the unpacking and installing would be trivial to implement. Matching up dependencies is harder, but doing that semi-automatically probably isn’t too bad.

I suspect this isn’t done because most debs are available as source code as well, and you’d rather just package that for reproducibility.

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Maybe GitHub - nix-community/nix-installers: Nix installers for legacy distributions (rpm & deb & pacman) [maintainer=@adisbladis] is interesting for you.

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It’s possible to do it automatically, but only if you’re willing to accept an inferior result. No amount of automatic systems can get around the fact that programs expect a certain filesystem structure at runtime that just isn’t there. So the only way to do this really automatically is to make a runtime container that looks enough like the OS they were designed for that they can run. It’s generally preferred to package a program in a more native way if possible, so this kind of automated system hasn’t been pursued much.

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Experimenting with automatically converting deb packages to nix would be a perfect fit for the dream2nix framework.

In order to do this, two modules would have to be added to dream2nix:

  1. A dream2nix impure translator consuming a .deb package and extracting all required metadata. This could be implemented as a script that runs upstream apt toolchain on the given .deb to resolve all required URLs and hashes and possibly extract some other metadata.
  2. A dream2nix .deb builder consuming the previously extracted metadata and generating one or more nix derivations.

The reason these two phases are separated, is that it allows to render a lock file after the impure translation, and therefore transforming a previously impure package installation into a fully reproducible package one.

It would be interesting to see how this plays out.

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This has been implemented during the summer of nix. See the example for debian-binary.

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That project seems amazing! I’m trying to figure out how to use it, hoping for more document

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This sounds great, but I’m unable to find anything about it in the examples or the documentation, I don’t know how I’d use it.

Nowhere in the code is a deb file ever named. The word “debian” only occurs in the changenote saying this feature was added.

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@makoConstruct It hasn’t yet been ported to the module system. It might still work on the legacy branch.