The Nix Hour

Currently Playing: The Nix Hour #8 [debugging package failures, package file indices]

The Nix Hour is a weekly beginner-oriented improvised Q&A-style lecture on Nix, where you can bring your questions and we'll answer them with more context, examples, alternatives, tradeoffs and related topics. The Nix hour happens every week, is open to the public and live-streamed to the Tweag YouTube channel. For more info check out https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nix-hour-a-weekly-nix-qa-lecture-by-tweag/22767 This week we looked at the following topics: 00:00 Intro: Looking at a breakage introduced with a new release 03:50 Git bisect: Finding a broken package for demonstration 05:41 Interlude: Difference between nixos- and release- branches 06:32 Finding a good and a bad commit for bisection 08:21 Starting the bisection 10:02 Faster build checks using nix-build-uncached 11:24 Automating the bisection 12:17 Question about testing things outside of nixpkgs/NixOS systems 13:43 Skipping a commit in case it needs to rebuild too many things 14:08 Looking up the PR for a commit once bisection finished 15:16 Building a NixOS VM from a configuration.nix file 18:42 Making the VM to run in the terminal 22:25 Creating an auto-logged in user for the VM 26:28 How to test hardware-dependent packages 28:31 patchelf and autoPatchelfHook 31:27 Picking the right packages for patchelf 35:23 Using nix-index for finding packages containing specific files 38:13 Using nix-index-database to get a prebuilt index 41:09 Finding libasound.so.2 using nix-index 42:39 Nixpkgs aliases and nixpkgs CI 44:45 nix-index command-not-found shell integration 45:51 Interpolating a Nix package into a shell command 47:49 comma command 50:18 Trying to explain NixOS' command-not-found module, but mislead slightly 53:05 programs.sqlite in Hydra channels 56:10 Impurities in NixOS 58:57 Website to check which channel has which PR included