Using `readFile` on derivation output

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I’m trying to package LibreWolf - draft PR here.

Packaging for this is a bit weird, since it’s just a few patches and then policy/preferences on top of vanilla Firefox. It’d be more accurate to call it a distribution than a fork.

This means that most of the packaging effort ends up being in the wrapper - which supports modifying the policies and configuration set by nixpkgs, however requires those to be set as an attrset/string respectively.

Long story short, this means I’d like to do something like this:

  1. fetchFromGitLab the policy/configuration repository
  2. readFile/importJSON the files in the resulting derivation
  3. Assign them to the appropriate inputs for the wrapper

Ofborg seems to not be able to build something like this though:

extraPrefs = builtins.readFile "${librewolf.extraLib}/librewolf.cfg";

My guess is that for nixpkgs, it is impossible to read strings from the nix store at evaluation time; presumably for some cloud-build or purity reason.

Is my suspicion correct? If so, what is the alternative? Change the Firefox wrapper to allow packages to set default contents like I currently do?

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Yes, your suspicion is correct. The feature that normally allows this is called import-from-derivation (or IFD for short) and is enabled by default. It can be disabled by setting the nix option allow-import-from-derivation or the hydra option allow_import_from_derivation to false (which is done on hydra.nixos.org).

I couldn’t find a source for this, but I assume the reason why it is disabled for nixpkgs is to make it possible for hydra to completely evaluate the jobset without having to build a derivation before delegating the actual builds to multiple builders.

In this case I think it should be possible to extend the firefox wrapper to make it possible to supply a file that will be prepended to the mozilla.cfg generated by the wrapper. That option could then be used to pass "${librewolf.extraLib}/librewolf.cfg", which would eliminate the need to read the file into nix.

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Ah, thanks for explaining. This was where I was heading if nobody responded anyway, hopefully it’s not too much churn :slight_smile:

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I think I have found a nixpkgs alternative for builtins.readFile that is not an IFD: lib.concatText Wait, sorry, this only produces a text file derivation, one still has to read from it…