`shell.nix` file

[tryoxiss]

I noticed the project has a flake.nix in its root, which is great to see some NixOS love! However I was looking at the setup guide and theres a lot of steps, so you should also add a shell.nix to aid in developement. With it, contributers with nix (package manager) or nixos would be able to simply clone the project and run nix-shell or nix develop and get all the 3rd party SO dependencies.

[tryoxiss]

I spent a while trying to get it, and I got pretty close -- the following is able to build the crate. However, it panics because it cant find libwayland, which I am unable to find a nixpkgs for after about 20m of searching. Im putting this here incase someone else starts on this we don't duplicate work.

let
    nixpkgs = fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tarball/nixos-23.11";
    pkgs = import nixpkgs { config = {}; overlays = []; };
in

pkgs.mkShellNoCC {
    packages = with pkgs; [
        # Dependencies I found on nixpkgs
        # before realising they are all
        # in magmawm.nix ...

        # systemdLibs
        wayland-protocols
        # libinput
        # libxkbcommon
        # libglvnd
        # seatd
        # dbus-glib
        # mesa

        wayland

        # from magmawm.nix
        libdrm
        libglvnd
        libinput
        libseat
        libxkbcommon
        mesa
        pkg-config
        systemdLibs # Contains libudev. DON'T PANIC: it won't install the whole init system
        wayland
        wayland-scanner
        xorg.libX11 # Needed for xwayland to work
        xorg.libXcursor
        xorg.libXi

        # Toolchain
        cargo
        gcc9 # "cc"
        rustc
    ];
}

[Alexandra]

is there a benefit of a shell.nix over just a flake? flakes have a devShells output that does the same thing.

[tryoxiss]

is there a benefit of a shell.nix over just a flake? flakes have a devShells output that does the same thing.

Currently shell.nix is considered stable but flake.nix is unstable (although thats not saying much considering flakes are basically stable). Theres also the benefit more people know about nix-shell, I certinly didn't know about devshells until you mentioned it.

Those aren't really good reasons though, so there very well may not be. I am pretty new to nix, I only started with it a month or so ago on my laptop which I don't use a ton so I am still not very familliar with it 😅

[Alexandra]

is there a benefit of a shell.nix over just a flake? flakes have a devShells output that does the same thing.

Currently shell.nix is considered stable but flake.nix is unstable (although thats not saying much considering flakes are basically stable). Theres also the benefit more people know about nix-shell, I certinly didn't know about devshells until you mentioned it.

Those aren't really good reasons though, so there very well may not be. I am pretty new to nix, I only started with it a month or so ago on my laptop which I don't use a ton so I am still not very familliar with it 😅

good luck on your Nix journey :D

[tryoxiss]

good luck on your Nix journey :D

Thanks! :D

[Michael Dorst]

This project's flake already has a dev shell, so I don't believe there's a reason to add a shell.nix. As it stands you can run

nix develop
cargo build

and the build should succeed (it's working for me anyway).

[tryoxiss]

This project's flake already has a dev shell, so I don't believe there's a reason to add a shell.nix. As it stands you can run

nix develop
cargo build

and the build should succeed (it's working for me anyway).

Yeah, doing that it builds correctly (though panics but I assume thats a diffrent issue). I think I will close this now then, someone can re-open it should there be a reason for it.