One-pager to help beginners troubleshoot derivations

d-goldin · November 3, 2019, 1:23pm

Hi,

I think that in nix-pills, nixos wiki and the nixos manual we lack a beginner friendly resource that helps to get off the ground with actual hands-on development of derivations. This is not because the necessary information is not available at all, but rather because it’s spread over various chapters and pages, which makes it a bit less accessible and harder to combine as a novice reader.

Here is my attempt at explaining some basic tools and approaches with a little bit more hand-holding:

github.com

d-goldin/nix-drv-debug-1p/blob/4b5339c0911af5022159ccfd897a0e5019f44a87/how_to_troubleshoot_derivations.md

# How to debug derivations

When starting out with developing derivations, it can be rather confusing to
trouble-shoot the nix code and build process.

This short page aims to explain a few tools and approaches that can help
figuring out what's wrong.

This repository contains a few subfolders with a minimal C program and
expressions defining a derivation. To follow along, you should already know the
basic use of `nix-build` to build nix expressions and be at least vaguely
familiar with C, a C compiler and make.

Each of the folders represents a slightly different type of problem that is
referred to in the different sections below. It should be possible for you to
easily toy around and replicate the results on your own.

One small remark about the code examples: Because we use `stdenv` we already
have most basic tooling available (like cc, make, bintools, coreutils) so we
don't need additional build inputs for most examples.

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I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, additions, feedback (ideally as a PR) and whether you think something like this might be useful and could possibly find a good home in one of our existing resources.

/dima