Howdy,
First post, be gentle.
Putting the main ask up front, for those who don’t want to read the context: is there a canonical example of how to write a “nonfree” nix package, i.e. a package that just fetches some binary blob and puts it in the nix store?
Now, the context:
I would like to try and figure out how to provide modern cosmopolitan and cosmocc nixpkgs. This seems to be a prerequisite to providing a nixpkg for llamafile, which seems to also be desirable.
There is a cosmopolitan and cosmocc package already, but it is ancient, and the build process has changed since then.
Nowadays, the only supported compiler for cosmopolitan libc is cosmocc, which is a fairly light wrapper around a cosmopolitan build of gcc. So we are in a situation in which new versions of the compiler are bootstrapped from existing versions of the compiler. (There is not really a concept of “platform” in cosmopolitan libc; the idea is that the same set of binaries should work everywhere, so the FreeBSD distribution is bit-for-bit identical with the Linux distribution, the Windows distribution, etc.)
I guess there are a few ways to tackle this. One that seems like it’d allow a good bit of flexibility would be to have a cosmocc-bootstrap (or somesuch) package that just fetches and unpacks the zip file for the latest version, and then a cosmocc package that depends on that package and uses it to build a distribution from the git repository.
Now a certain version of cosmopolitan wants to be built by a certain version of cosmocc, so the two packages would often need to update in lockstep. But this scheme would, I suppose, make it easier to do development on the cosmocc code from within nix? Otherwise it seems pointless to have the layer of indirection and the cosmocc-bootstrap package may as well just be named cosmocc and behave like a “nonfree” package.
Anyway, once there is a current cosmocc, it should be more or less trivial to make a cosmopolitan package. And from there, it should be easy enough to make a llamafile package.
Any suggestions welcome, thanks.
Oh for the record my familiarity level with Nix/NixOS is “I have a laptop and a VM running it and I can edit configuration.nix, and I’ve made lightweight edits to existing packages with lots of hand-holding in the past.”