add nix configuration file for development setup #19586
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I think the comment here: #19585 (comment) is still very relevant
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That comment is about PBS, and PBS isn't used at all in this setup. Am I missing something here? |
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Sorry, I should've commented on the Also, we might just rip the PBS band-aid though (from this discussion) since it looks like |
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Well, even if hdrhistogram grows wheels, there's still protobuf, Python, rustup etc. that need to be installed. So I think a nix configuration still makes things easier. I'd rather install one tool than three. |
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Yeah my point is just that clang likely shouldn't be in this list and with PBS, python will be out as well. Then, others can decide whether we want to accept this file. I can't say I've seen many other projects using this kind of thing, or that I personally have ever used nix before, so I'm not sure I'm the best to approve it |
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I've never used nix so I can't comment on the specifics, but I am generally down with the concept! I think @jriddy is well placed to review and comment. |
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Well, @jriddy, you could also approach it from the other side: if you have Nix, you no longer need PBS – you can just use the tool that you're going to use anyway to install the other development tools, i. e. rustup and protoc. I suppose you just give it a try and see if it works for you 😃 Ideally on a Mac, which I don't have and therefore cannot test. |
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I don't have a Mac but I can test with a standalone version of Nix on Fedora or Debian. |
| @@ -26,6 +26,10 @@ We use the popular forking workflow typically used by open source projects. See | |||
| Step 2: Bootstrap the Rust engine | |||
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| Pants requires several dependencies to be installed: a Python 3.9 interpreter, Rust, the protobuf compiler, clang and others. The easiest and fastest way to set up an environment with all necessary dependencies is to use the Nix package manager. The Pants repository includes a suitable `shell.nix` file. Follow the instructions on the [Nix website](https://nixos.org/download.html) to install Nix. Then `cd` into the directory where you cloned the Pants repo and type `nix-shell`. This will download all the necessary dependencies and start a shell with a suitably configured PATH variable to make them available for use. | |||
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I'd be wary of using wording that suggests this is a blessed way getting a dev environment up and running until we have reasonable quorum of contributors using it.
When we say "the easiest and fastest" way to do something is X, we're implicitly committing to supporting that methodology. Since almost none of us have extensive experience with Nix, I wouldn't want to claim or even suggest that.
More conservatively, we could claim there's experimental support for a Nix closure (is that the right terminology) that makes dev setup easy.
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Fair enough, I've changed the wording to reflect this.
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Hi @mberndt123, did we drop the ball on review iteration on this? Apologies if so. I'd still be open to merging it. Alternatively we can consider using nix to build pants itself if/when we add support for pants using nix, per #19537 |
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Hey @benjyw, |
Hey,
after I've had a lot of trouble setting up a development environment for Pants, I'd like to contribute the kind of development setup workflow that I wish I had had.
This PR includes a nix configuration file that specifies the necessary dependencies. It also includes documentation about how to use it.
To ensure that I haven't missed any dependencies and that everything works correctly, I created a pretty minimal Ubuntu 22.04 container (I installed only git, curl, xz-utils and nix), cloned the Pants repo and bootstrapped pants – it seems to work flawlessly.