Nix notes

| tagged with

    Enabling debugging for a package,

    wireshark = pkgs.wireshark.override {
  gtk = pkgs.enableDebugging pkgs.gtk;
  libnl = pkgs.enableDebugging pkgs.libnl;
};

    Finding the definition of an attribute

    For instance, of enableDebugging,

    builtins.unsafeGetAttrPos "enableDebugging" pkgs

    Default builder

    The definition of the default builder script can be found here,

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/56904d7c423f2b13b37fbd29f39bbb4b52bc7824/pkgs/stdenv/generic/setup.sh

    Basic syntax

    There are a few types in Nix, * Sets (really a dictionary it seems): { hello: "world"; theAnswer: 42; } * Lists: [ 1 2 3 ] * Strings: "hello world" * Booleans: true * Numbers: 42 * Lambdas: x: y

    Lambda syntax is a bit odd: in Haskell what we would write as \\x -> y you would write in Nix as x: y