I do want to install globally, as outlined in my original comment. Unless you can tell me how to somehow modify the installation of Weechat to also include this one Python package.
I think Nix is a really cool concept and no doubt there are certain use cases that it solves really well. But my experience with it as a day to day package manager was that it just made simple things hard without a proportional benefit to make all the trouble worth it.
pkgs.weechat.override { extraBuildInputs = [ pkgs.python3Packages.pync ]; };
};
Looking at the Nixpkgs docs, you might prefer a different override expression. Several examples are provided: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-weechat
I understand that this may still feel like 'making a simple thing hard', but it does, I hope, answer your question. Modifying existing packages in just a few lines of code in order to include additional dependencies is very much part of Nix's paradigm. :)
There's a way you could write all that inline to install it with nix-env, too, but I can't be arsed.
Once you apply the override concept with Weechat, you'll have a feel for what is a very general suite of customization mechanisms in Nixpkgs. That'll be unlikely to miss a similar opportunity with other packages.
NixOS Discourse is a great place to clear stumbling blocks like these, by the way :)
Thanks for convincing me to give it another shot!
The goal that Nix tries to solve, is to make all implicit dependencies explicit. The proper way of doing is to list these packages in the WeeChat.
Anyway I never used it myself, but looks like nixpkgs has dedicated section for it: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/#sec-weechat
> I think Nix is a really cool concept and no doubt there are certain use cases that it solves really well. But my experience with it as a day to day package manager was that it just made simple things hard without a proportional benefit to make all the trouble worth it.
Yes, it indeed it makes simple things hard, but then this approach makes hard things easy. Because every package in Nix repo have explicit dependencies it solves many other problems. You no longer have dll hell for example a project that uses nix to build, generally just builds without issues.
I use Nix for development and the great thing is that I can use it to describe all tooling that I need for development. So another person can replicate the same environment. I was able for example to write a custom modules to standardize dev environment. And if someone uses it I can easily use the same mechanism to produce:
- nix package - wheel package (it is for Python project) - package application into docker with just only the necessary pieces (can also slim python by only compiling features that are actually used)
When using nix for building, I can speed up the work, because Nix only rebuilds things when things change. For example in traditional pipeline when you work on dev branch when you merge branch it typically rebuilds the whole thing. Nix is smart, and tracks what actually changed. If no actual files changed the build will return immediately with the binary that was produced on the branch. If during the merge our branch was integrated with some other changes that happened in the master branch, Nix will know to rebuild it again. In addition to that, on average built time was cut in half for me.