Installing frc toolchain on NixOS

[colescott]

Hey CD,

For the last few days I have been trying to get the frc c++ toolchain to install on my NixOS computer. The main issue with this is that nixos has its own package manager and does not support apt-get, aptitude, yum, etc. I tried manually downloading the packages from the launchpad and installing them using dpkg but there was a loop regarding libc and libgcc... Probably because they are supposed to be on the system by default.
I also tried the toolchain-builder bitbucket and after a few fixed 404s it still had no proper makefile for my purposes.

Any help would be much appreciated because I am completely stuck.
Thanks!

[calcmogul]

If you're up for it and are familiar with NixOS's packaging system, you could make new packages for your distro to build everything from source. That's what I did for Arch Linux because it fit Arch's packaging standards.

I don't know how NixOS does their packaging, but here's the Arch metapackage (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/frc-2016) that links to others for building GCC, etc. if you need a starting point for the build commands. Select "View PKGBUILD" on each package's page to see them.

[marshall]

Hey could someone make a package for Solaris or AIX? Thanks.

Free advice (it's mostly worthless) form a mentor and a cranky old IT dude (though definitely not as cranky as some around these parts) spare yourselves the pain and get Virtual Box or Workstation or Fusion or whatever Type 2 hypervisor you want and then install a Ubuntu or Windows VM and call it a day or get a more mainstream OS installed on another system you can use for development.

Spend all of the energy you would have spent on getting the software working on your totally k-rad custom OS and super customized development environment on making better robot code and improving the robot.

Or don't... delving into the world of stupid ideas like building Linux from Scratch and spending 3 days trying to discover how you fat-fingered a BASH script and couldn't boot with a useable key map all the while not being able to check your email for a missing assignment or studying for finals can lead to great things too! :cool:

[colescott]

Thanks for the suggestions!
I think I will end up just making a nixos package for it so hopefully I can save a few others from this headache.