Why does the NixOS infrastructure have to be hosted in a centralized way?

[amjoseph]

@emily

I think there are probably ways that downstream derivations could condition on the availability of an API that would be tricky to deal with.

You might have heard of a tool that does this on purpose, called “autoconf”

@emily

Re: prelink, @fzakaria’s recent blog posts on optimizing dynamic loading with Nix and “management time” feel very relevant here.

Yes I had, but I couldn’t remember where I had read it. Thanks for the reminder; for everybody else: @fzakaria’s article Speeding up ELF relocations for store-based systems shows what’s possible, and the results are much better than prelink(8).

@emily

Unfortunately there is also the matter of tests … but maybe something clever could be cooked up.

Yeah, in long run the the (install)checkPhase needs to be moved into a separate derivation (like #209870 did for gcc) and nix-build’s scheduler needs to learn validations like Ninja has. Then the checks could run after relinking. It would also let us run the checkPhase for cross-compiled builds, using either qemu or a smaller cluster of native builders. Some more details.