redox-nix

A work-in-progress "guaranteed" way to build Redox without errors for people with the the nix package manager installed on their system.

What's nix?

Nix is a package manager that focuses on being reliable and reproducible. It supports rollbacks and installing multiple versions of packages. In some ways it is an alternative to docker, but is more lightweight on your system as it does not require building a whole filesystem for each application...

Roadmap

redox-nix was created in order to be able to build Redox on NixOS without needing to constantly send and upstream patches to the Redox repositories. The short term idea was to gather all patches in one place. The long term idea is to replace the GNU make build system and only use nix to build each separate component that makes up redox.

Usage

If you don't have direnv installed (highly recommended though)

# Clone the repository
git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox-nix

# Enter a nix development shell with all the necessary packages and patches.
cd redox-nix
nix-shell

# Happy hacking on Redox!
cd redox

If you do have direnv installed:

# Clone the repository
git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.redox-os.org/redox-os/redox-nix

# Happy hacking on Redox!
cd redox-nix/redox
direnv allow # only needed first time

Components

As a part of the goal to slowly move the main build system to GNU make, we have started nix-ifying some repositories in the components/ directory.

redoxfs can be compiled by executing nix-build components -A redoxfs
redoxer can be compiled by executing nix-build components -A redoxer
binary-gcc-install, binary-rust-install, and binary-relibc-install download and patch some toolchains from static.redox-os.org. May run out of memory.

Every other component, for now, is available as normal in the redox/ submodule.

Overrides

You can override the source of most components using my-overrides.nix in the root of the repository, like this:

{
  redoxer = ./redoxer;
  redoxfs = ./redoxfs;
}

the sources are automatically stripped from binary files and other data that shouldn't be copied around endlessly to the nix store.

To temporarily ignore overrides, you can pass --arg ignoreOverrides true to the command, such as

nix-build components -A redoxer --arg ignoreOverrides true

Enable components

You can enable specific components to automatically get installed in the nix-shell by creating the file my-components.nix at the root, inputting a list of components and specifying which components to enable. Function should input an inexact number of elements, as in the future I might want more inputs.

Example:

{ components, ... }:
with components; [
  redoxer
]

redoxer

An amazing tool for testing programs on redox is redoxer. However, it currently has a few runtime dependencies that can be easy to miss or have broken versions of. Nix eliminates this problem:

nix run -f ./components redoxer # or enable redoxer in my-components.nix

# Only needed first install:
redoxer install
rm -rf ~/.redoxer/toolchain
nix-build components -A binary-rust-install -o ~/.redoxer/toolchain

It's sadly still not really one-click, but it's close enough for a one-time setup.

awsomearvinder / redox-nix

readme