This has a major advantage: you can write hooks directly in Nix
expressions. For instance, rather than write a builder like this:
source $stdenv/setup
postInstall=postInstall
postInstall() {
ln -sf gzip $out/bin/gunzip
ln -sf gzip $out/bin/zcat
}
genericBuild
(the gzip builder), you can just add this attribute to the
derivation:
postInstall = "ln -sf gzip $out/bin/gunzip; ln -sf gzip $out/bin/zcat";
and so a separate build script becomes unnecessary. This should
allow us to get rid of most builders in Nixpkgs.
* Allow configure and make arguments to contain whitespace.
Previously, you could say, for instance
configureFlags="CFLAGS=-O0"
but not
configureFlags="CFLAGS=-O0 -g"
since the `-g' would be interpreted as a separate argument to
configure. Now you can say
configureFlagsArray=("CFLAGS=-O0 -g")
or similarly
configureFlagsArray=("CFLAGS=-O0 -g" "LDFLAGS=-L/foo -L/bar")
which does the right thing. Idem for makeFlags, installFlags,
checkFlags and distFlags.
Unfortunately you can't pass arrays to Bash through the environment,
so you can't put the array above in a Nix expression, e.g.,
configureFlagsArray = ["CFLAGS=-O0 -g"];
since it would just be flattened to a since string. However, you
can use the inline hooks described above:
preConfigure = "configureFlagsArray=(\"CFLAGS=-O0 -g\")";
svn path=/nixpkgs/trunk/; revision=6863
0b7e256162