Alyssa Ross
4f80464645
Previously, the build system used uname(1) output when it wanted to check the operating system it was being built for, which meant that it didn't take into-account cross-compilation when the build and host operating systems were different. To fix this, instead of consulting uname output, we consult the host triple, specifically the third "kernel" part. For "kernel"s with stable ABIs, like Linux or Cygwin, we can use a simple ifeq to test whether we're compiling for that system, but for other platforms, like Darwin, FreeBSD, or Solaris, we have to use a more complicated check to take into account the version numbers at the end of the "kernel"s. I couldn't find a way to just strip these version numbers in GNU Make without shelling out, which would be even more ugly IMO. Because these checks differ between kernels, and the patsubst ones are quite fiddly, I've added variables for each host OS we might want to check to make them easier to reuse.
Nix
Nix is a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. Please refer to the Nix manual for more details.
Installation
On Linux and macOS the easiest way to install Nix is to run the following shell command (as a user other than root):
$ curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
Information on additional installation methods is available on the Nix download page.
Building And Developing
See our Hacking guide in our manual for instruction on how to build nix from source with nix-build or how to get a development environment.
Additional Resources
- Nix manual
- Nix jobsets on hydra.nixos.org
- NixOS Discourse
- Matrix - #nix:nixos.org
- IRC - #nixos on libera.chat
License
Nix is released under the LGPL v2.1.