Post #1308443

2026-02-19 14:07 UTC

It's been fun, it feels like a new superpower to "quickly fix something and send a PR". It's also a super dangerous rabbit hole generator, because now that it's easy to fix stuff, it's very tempting to do so… 🐇 My prototype has some rough edges: It clones the latest commit, which doesn't always compile using the #nixpkgs setup (but it seems reasonable to check whether the bug is still there). And invoking the phases of the nixpkgs stdenv manually can be tricky. https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-building-stdenv-package-in-nix-shell

Replies (4)

@blinry@chaos.social 2026-02-19 14:13

For myself, ideally, the script would set up a #Nix flake with all dependencies in it, and activate it using direnv. Which would probably mean transforming the nixpkgs package into a flake? The script could also give you some aliases to run the nixpkgs phases like configure, patch, or build, from your current shell – I like using the fish shell, but the stdenv assumes bash. I haven't found a reasonable way to invoke the phases "in a subshell"… Getting errors like this: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/15282

Open ##1308445
@dwardoric@chaos.social 2026-02-19 14:12

@blinry Everything in me currently screams "Smalltalk" ;-)

Open ##1308497
@benrutter@mastodon.green 2026-02-19 18:45

@blinry This is such an awesome idea! When I read your first toot I thought immediately "that'd be near impossible for non-interpetted language programmes" but I love this because you've converted it into essentially a search problem! Such a clever way to take stuff from "almost impossible" to "super achievable" almost instantly!

Open ##1308527
@RussSharek@mastodon.art 2026-02-20 02:03

@blinry This seems like just the thing to shave papercuts and rough edges off linux mobile efforts.

Open ##1308528