diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'maintainers')
| -rw-r--r-- | maintainers/docs/static-initial-env | 32 |
1 files changed, 32 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/maintainers/docs/static-initial-env b/maintainers/docs/static-initial-env new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..024a62a311e7 --- /dev/null +++ b/maintainers/docs/static-initial-env @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +Upgrading the standard initial environment + +For Nix on i686-linux we make use of an environment of statically linked +tools (see $nixpkgs/stdenv/linux). The first version of these tools were +compiled outside of Nix, in an impure environment. They are used as some +magical ingredient to make everything work. To keep these tools more in +synchronization with the rest of nixpkgs and to make porting of nixpkgs +to other platforms easier the static versions are now also built with Nix +and nixpkgs. + +The tools can be found in nixpkgs in: + +- shells/bash-static +- tools/networking/curl-diet +- tools/archivers/gnutar-diet +- tools/compression/gzip-diet +- tools/text/gnused-diet +- tools/text/diffutils-diet +- tools/text/gnupatch-diet +- tools/misc/findutils-static +(still missing: bzip2) + +Most packages are compiled with dietlibc, an alternate C library, apart +from bash and findutils, which are statically linked to glibc. The reason +we chose dietlibc has various reasons. First of all, curl cannot be built +statically with glibc. If we do, we get a static binary, but it cannot resolve +hostnames to IP addresses. glibc dynamically loads functionality at runtime +to do resolving. When linking with dietlibc this doesn't happen. + +The static tools are not used as part of the input hashing (see Eelco's +PhD thesis, paragraph 5.4.1), so changing them does not change anything and +will not force a massive rebuild. |