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Nix Packages collection & NixOS
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Refactor r-modules / rPackages / etc - hard to override #60493

Open deliciouslytyped opened 5 years ago

deliciouslytyped commented 5 years ago

Sorry if I missed something; Either the R packages implementation needs more documentation or it needs to be refactored. It seems utterly impossible to override most things.

I was trying to help someone to debug reticle and I would have wanted to recompile with lower optimization levels and/or various changed compilation flags. The current infrastructure does not visibly support this.

Note: My mostly unsuccessful research suggests that R CMD INSTALL may rely on --configure-vars, --configure-flags, and some kind of "makevars" file, for influencing package compilation. Out of these, --configure-flags is used at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/00fe2aaffeaeb1b7857145274869e7f4399a3fe0/pkgs/development/r-modules/generic-builder.nix#L39 but I could not see a way to actually override that because everything is called in an opaque way from...IIRC whatever provides rWrapper.

I managed to hack in some stuff by overriding preConfigure on the stdenv passed in to the infrastructure :P , but I was ultimately unsuccessful. Maybe the optimization flags were coming from GCC? - my extra flags did not seem to appear regardless.

TL;DR: confusion and opacity.

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