Compiling packages from source

[sjLambda]

Is there a simple example I'd like to follow or copy? A scenario I'm interested in is to make a flake that downloads emacs sources from the trunk of master git branch and compiles the entire program locally on my machines (mac and linux). I tweak dozens of compiler options for make and ./configure. It would be nice to have them all in a single flake for easy editing and testing.

I'm posting this on a suggestion by @tweag on youtube. Because of my travel schedule and timezone issues, I may not be able to join your chat live, but I'd welcome any forum or method where such flakes are covered.

Sounds like a good topic for a Nix hour! If you join a Nix hour, feel free to ask this question, or if you can't make it, create a ticket in https://github.com/tweag/nix-hour/issues (though it might take some time to get to it).

[infinisil]

We decided to focus on this topic for this weeks Nix Hour, this Friday at 15:00 CET! If anybody has any questions about the general topic of Compiling packages from source, either:

• Comment them in this issue
• Ask them during the stream using the chat

[steveej]

i recently switched to an aarch64 based machine and am missing support for some packages that i regularly used on x86_64. the most important one for me was logseq. i quickly gobbled together an aarch64-linux AppImage and copied the upstream package expressions to modify the src. i'd love to see a source build for logseq, and other AppImage packages, many of which happen to be Electron based.

not sure if it's feasible in an hour, but converting the ubuntu-based Containerfile to a nix expression would be great to see.

[infinisil]

@steveej Ah sorry didn't see this until after the stream, I'll leave this issue open in case we have time to come back to this :)