Rust CoreUtils replacement

1

This was at the top of HN just now:

It seems to me that it would be straightforward to override coreutils in NixPkgs and see what breaks, right?

(this is one of those times where I get an idea and I really should be working on something else, so I’ll leave it at this post)

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2

I think the biggest struggle will be to bootstrap rust without causing an infinit recursion.

3

You certainly will. You will to have an stdenv compiled without change, and then an stdenv with patched coreutils. I’ve made some stuff about this idea:

{ nixpkgs ? <nixpkgs>}:

let
    unpatched_pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {};

    patched_coreutils = (unpatched_pkgs.uutils-coreutils.overrideAttrs (old: {
        /*prePatch = ''
            export buildPhase=
        '';*/
        #postBuild = "make $makeFlags"; #this seem useless
        # can we just skip the rust build phase ?
        postInstall = ''
            make install $makeFlags
        '';
    })).override {prefix="";};

    patched_stdenv = unpatched_pkgs.stdenv.override (old: {
        initialPath = [
            patched_coreutils
            unpatched_pkgs.findutils
            unpatched_pkgs.diffutils
            unpatched_pkgs.gnused
            unpatched_pkgs.gnugrep
            unpatched_pkgs.gawk
            unpatched_pkgs.gnutar
            unpatched_pkgs.gzip
            unpatched_pkgs.bzip2.bin
            unpatched_pkgs.gnumake
            unpatched_pkgs.bash
            unpatched_pkgs.patch
            unpatched_pkgs.xz.bin
        ];
    });


    pkgs = import nixpkgs {
        overlays = [
            (self: super: {
                coreutils = patched_coreutils;
                stdenv = patched_stdenv;
            })
        ];
    };
in {
    bash = unpatched_pkgs.bash.override { stdenv = patched_stdenv; };
    #uutils = patched_coreutils;
}

I haven’t yet tried (as I was offline when I wrote this). I also need to rewrite the uutils package in nixpkgs too (but I overwrited). As it only have the uutils […] binary in the nixpkgs version (probably a bug after an automatic upgrade, as it have the flag for this). Or a change in the buildRustCrate.

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4

I did a coreutils reference free stdenv before I saw marius answer: stdenv: add uutils-coreutils stdenv by SuperSandro2000 · Pull Request #116274 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub

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