Optional Mac-friendly functionality for `nix-env`

[copumpkin]

This is just an idea, but I'm trying to think of how I'd want .app files to be managed by Nix, and I think this is it:

1. Mac derivations contain by convention something like $out/Applications/MyApp.app
2. Just the way nix-env manages ~/.nix-profile on all systems, on Darwin it should be somewhat aware of ~/Applications
3. On macOS, every time it updates the user's profile, it looks for Applications in the profile's symlink tree, finds all top-level .app files (really folders) in there, and creates/updates macOS alias files for them in ~/Applications. These need to be macOS aliases because Spotlight (the macOS indexing system) doesn't index symlinks. I'm unsure if the aliases need to point to the underlying nix store paths or if they can point to the symlinks in the user's profile. This isn't ideal because it hurts the atomicity of environment updates a bit, but I don't think it'll be terrible

Any thoughts? It's not beautiful in part because ~/Applications doesn't "belong" to Nix (so other things could be in it), and in part because we can't use symlinks, but I think it would work quite nicely for a lot of things.

I see this as an alternate proposal to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/956, which wants to completely own ~/Applications and assumes symlinks.

@edolstra @LnL7 @acowley @shlevy @domenkozar @mpscholten @matthewbauer

[copumpkin]

I think @matthewbauer's post-create-profile-hook would handle this sort of thing. I struggle to think of other uses for it than this (perhaps Windows?) but the more generic method might be good.

[LnL7]

Related https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/issues/11.

[shlevy]

I think this is probably the right thing, though it's awful :tongue:

[matthewbauer]

I don't think there should be any more Mac-specific features in Nix than is absolutely necessary.

What I like about a post-create-profile-hook is that it could be used in other cases, although you're right it's not exactly clear where is could be used. I suppose in non-NixOS Linux environments it could setup links in ~/.local/share/applications and some other things to make app "visible" by the DE (perhaps that's useful in NixOS as well).

Some important questions about this though:

• Should the hook be specified for the derivation or globally for all derivations?
  • In other words, would the hook run every time a new profile is created or just when a derivation has the post-create-profile-hook attribute set?
  • For the latter, we would want to start differentiating between "apps" and non-"apps" in nixpkgs. I've thought this could be useful for a while, but it would be a big change. Each derivation would use something like stdenv.mkApplication, stdenv.mkFont, stdenv.mkLibrary, etc.
• Should this hook "propagate" to buildInputs or propagatedBuildInputs as well?
  • For instance, user installs an app that depends on Qt, but Qt provides a couple of .app's in /nix/store/.../Applications. Do we want those apps to appear in the user's ~/Applications folder?

[copumpkin]

Well, what I'm proposing wouldn't happen per-derivation. It'd be a post-buildEnv action, and would consume the output of buildEnv. Either as a generic hook or as a Mac-specific thing. I don't see any reason to make it more general than that, or to have to think about propagation and all that jazz. Propagation gets ugly due to the difficulty of defining what it means to be an input (buildInputs vs. string dependencies, etc.), and I'd rather just avoid it all.

I'd rather just make a "symlink tree" (alias tree) of the contents of the environment's Applications folder in whichever structure the individual derivations specify. So if Qt has $out/Applications/Foo/Util.app, you end up with an alias to that in a folder under ~/Applications

[matthewbauer]

Ok, that would definitely be simpler. Another thing to think about: how to go about cleaning up old ~symlinks~ aliases when a new profile is created. Can we just delete everything in ~/Applications/ that is a ~symlink~ alias? What if I have a ~symlink~ alias that I don't want deleted? Maybe it even points to a path in /nix/store/.../Applications/....

Related is whether the ~symlink~ alias should go from ~/Applications/... to ~/.nix-profile/Applications/... or just directly to /nix/store/.../Applications/....

[copumpkin]

@matthewbauer it should know the previous generation and the current generation and be able to figure out which aliases it should be getting rid of/changing/adding. The second point is what I didn't know in my original proposal, and also keep in mind that it can't be a symlink, but rather must be a Mac alias.

[shlevy]

We may want to do something like the /etc/static thing NixOS does to make it a little bit closer to atomic.

[matthewbauer]

also keep in mind that it can't be a symlink, but rather must be a Mac alias.

Interesting, the only way to make these from a CLI seems to be osxutils? Somebody should get that in Nixpkgs😈...

[matthewbauer]

If there's interest in post-create-profile-hook, I can try to type up an RFC over the weekend and put it on NixOS/rfcs.

[therealpxc]

We could get font installation through Nix to work right on macOS this way, too, I think. :-)

[alyssais]

Is it enough to just tell LaunchServices about the application with lsregister, rather than symlinking them?

[copumpkin]

@alyssais how do you mean? The main thing I was trying to address is that spotlight and spotlight-based tools (e.g., Alfred) for launching apps don't pick up symlinks, so even though we could symlink stuff to ~/Applications, they wouldn't be very user-friendly. Are you suggesting to put "fake" shim .apps into ~/Applications that then call the real ones in the nix store?

[eqyiel]

@copumpkin FYI

I realised the same thing (that spotlight and spotlight-based tools like Aflred) don't follow symlinks and did something like this using macOS Alias files (bookmark88 format).

This is not a general solution but you may be interested how I did it: https://github.com/eqyiel/dotfiles/blob/5fbad92e52a636bc85f10f06e7c0766009358038/nix/.config/nixpkgs/darwin/modules/link-apps/default.nix#L3-L35

And the swift code to create an alias file: https://github.com/eqyiel/dotfiles/blob/5fbad92e52a636bc85f10f06e7c0766009358038/nix/.config/nixpkgs/darwin/modules/link-apps/create-macos-alias.swift

(Copying here for posterity because I set that repo to private)

#!/usr/bin/env swift

// Create an alias file ("bookmark88" format).  Note that although Finder treats
// this like a symlink, it is different.
//
// Equivalent to:
// osascript -e "tell application "Finder" to make new alias at POSIX file \"${dest}\" to POSIX file \"${src}\""

import Foundation

var src: String?
var dest: String?

if CommandLine.argc < 3 {
    print("Expected two arguments: src and dest.")
    exit(1)
} else {
    src = CommandLine.arguments[1]
    dest = CommandLine.arguments[2]
}

let url = URL(fileURLWithPath: src!)
let aliasUrl = URL(fileURLWithPath: dest!)

do {
    let data = try url.bookmarkData(options: .suitableForBookmarkFile, includingResourceValuesForKeys: nil, relativeTo: nil)
    try URL.writeBookmarkData(data, to: aliasUrl)
} catch {
    print("Unexpected error: \(error).")
    exit(1)
}

[stale[bot]]

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info