Hey so this is a quirk I’ve bumped into with several builds in the past; the automake name, “no-install” targets, is a convenient description of what I’m talking about - but this category of target appears in all manner of builds.
As a quick refresher, “no-install” targets are generally scripts or binaries produced during a build, which are used to create generated sources, but these targets are never installed.
When using Nix I often find that it’s necessary to split a buildPhase into multiple parts, or else build and fixup these “no-install” targets during preBuild ( which has to be done much more cautiously because of makeFlagsArray propagation ).
I was wondering if anyone was aware of an existing idiom/pattern for handling these types of targets. If one doesn’t exist, I wanted to spitball ideas on possibly extending setup.sh with a new setup-hook, or the addition of a new phase between preBuild and buildPhase - perhaps nativeBuildPhase or something ( that name could use some work-shopping ).
The reason fixup routines such as running patchelf or patchShebangs are a headache is really because if we use the standard make targets such make all or make install; we lack a clean way to hook the Makefile to add fixup for any “no-install” targets. The approach I currently take is something to the effect of ( this is to illustrate the process, I know that this isn’t ideal ):
stdenv.mkDerivation {
/* ... */
noInstallTargets = [ "foo" "bar.sh" ];
buildPhase = ''
runHook preBuild
: ${makeFlags=}
if [[ -z "$makeFlags" && -z "${makefile:-}" && ! ( -e Makefile || -e makefile || -e GNUmakefile ) ]]; then
echo "no Makefile, doing nothing"
else
foundMakefile=1
local flagsArray=(
${enableParallelBuilding:+-j${NIX_BUILD_CORES} -l${NIX_BUILD_CORES}}
SHELL=$SHELL
$makeFlags "${makeFlagsArray[@]}"
$buildFlags "${buildFlagsArray[@]}"
)
echoCmd 'build flags' "${flagsArray[@]}"
# Create no-install targets first
if [[ -n "$noInstallTargets" ]]; then
make ${makefile:+-f $makefile} "${flagsArray[@]}" $noInstallTargets
# This is a really bad way to decide how to fixup - that's not really the point of this example though
for t in $noInstallTargest; do
if file -Lb $t|grep -q '^ASCII text'; then
patchShebangs --build $t
else
autoPatchelf $t
fi
done
# Run "regular" build
make ${makefile:+-f $makefile} "${flagsArray[@]}"
unset flagsArray
fi
runHook PostBuild
}
'';
/* ... */
}