Re: [gnu-prog-discuss] Re: continuous builds and portability testing with Hydra

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Brian Gough <address@hidden> writes:

> At Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:56:23 GMT,
> Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> If you're interested in having your GNU package included in Hydra, the
>> GNU development resources web page contains the instructions and other
>> information:
>>   http://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html
>
>
> Below is a rough list of packages which (probably) don't have Nixpkg
> descriptions.  It's from a regular expression match using the package
> names in /gd/gnuorg/maintainers.bypkg, plus some manual checking, so
> it's only a guide.
>
> You can check if your package has a description in Nixpkgs by looking
> in the 'all-packages.nix' file at
> https://svn.nixos.org/repos/nix/nixpkgs/trunk/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix

Thanks for making this list!

I’d like to avoid any possible confusion between Nixpkgs and continuous
builds at <http://hydra.nixos.org/project/gnu>, though.

Nixpkgs and Nixpkgs-libre [0] are stable package distributions, similar
to, e.g., Debian, except that they can also be used on non-GNU platforms
such as Darwin and Cygwin (Nixpkgs contains a few packages for non-free
software, which have been removed in Nixpkgs-libre.)  GNU packages in
Nixpkgs{,-libre} are built from release tarballs.

The GNU ‘project’ at <http://hydra.nixos.org/project/gnu> is about
continuously building GNU software straight from the VCS.  As for
Nixpkgs, build recipes are written in the Nix language, but in a
different way to accommodate the needs of continuous builds (typically
it starts by running the ‘bootstrap’ script, run “make dist”, and build
from that tarball.)

IOW, a GNU package can be present in Nixpkgs but not built at
<http://hydra.nixos.org/project/gnu> and vice versa.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] http://repo.or.cz/w/nixpkgs-libre.git