Ship a default.nix via inst/extdata?

[philipp-baumann]

I thought this might be useful for windows. Basically one could just include "R" version plus {rix} dev version from github. @b-rodrigues what do you think?

[philipp-baumann]

#6

[philipp-baumann]

It is mostly to avoid cyclic dependencies, since one can only run rix::rix() after installation unless doing some magic parsing tricks ;-)

[philipp-baumann]

the other option would be to provide a helper in R, that can be sourced from base R.

[philipp-baumann]

@b-rodrigues aaah rix::rix() is only using base R, so easy to do.

[b-rodrigues]

I don't understand what you're suggesting?

[philipp-baumann]

ok sorry for being unclear. I thought it would be useful on Win or WSL2, respectively, to install and use rix easily. For this, one could use a default .nix file. Is the intention clear?

[philipp-baumann]

ok sorry for being unclear. I thought it would be useful on Win or WSL2, respectively, to install and use rix easily. For this, one could use a default .nix file. Is the intention clear?

mainly because the package depends on httr and curl, which require system commands. With nix, it is really straight-forward to bootstrap without also first installing GNU compiler toolchain via apt (at least WSL2 does not give that by default).

[philipp-baumann]

The disadvantage is of course that one has to manually update (nixpkgs version, R version etc.), if one would go through external data. That would maybe speak for a helper.

[b-rodrigues]

Ah I got it now, sorry! But wouldn't users need to be able to install the package in the first place to get access to inst/default.nix? Which is why I wrote that section in the vignette

https://b-rodrigues.github.io/rix/articles/interactive-use.html#scenario-2-you-install-r-and-rstudio-using-nix

[philipp-baumann]

Ah I got it now, sorry! But wouldn't users need to be able to install the package in the first place to get access to inst/default.nix? Which is why I wrote that section in the vignette

https://b-rodrigues.github.io/rix/articles/interactive-use.html#scenario-2-you-install-r-and-rstudio-using-nix

true, but one can also just cat to nix-build in bash, right?

[philipp-baumann]

aah now also getting, you are right, cat'ing inst/extdata/default.nix would make sense.

[philipp-baumann]

@

Ah I got it now, sorry! But wouldn't users need to be able to install the package in the first place to get access to inst/default.nix? Which is why I wrote that section in the vignette

https://b-rodrigues.github.io/rix/articles/interactive-use.html#scenario-2-you-install-r-and-rstudio-using-nix

thanks for pointing to that resource. That is actually sufficient for the README, so I will just PR add the link, ok?

[b-rodrigues]

yes that’d be great, and you are right as well, we could put that script in inst/ext and then have users run

nix-shell https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rix/master/inst/extdata/default.nix

which I believe should drop them in a nix-shell with R and rix installed, so from there they could start building new default.nix files and work from there. What do you think?

[philipp-baumann]

yes that’d be great, and you are right as well, we could put that script in inst/ext and then have users run

nix-shell https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rix/master/inst/extdata/default.nix

which I believe should drop them in a nix-shell with R and rix installed, so from there they could start building new default.nix files and work from there. What do you think?

I like that approach! Let me draft so users can tap like this. 💯

[b-rodrigues]

But let's make clear that rix can be used even if nix is not installed, so windows users could install rix on windows (and the dependencies would be easily installed, because binaries for Windows are available) and generate default.nix files that they could then build with Nix on WSL2 or on another machine with Nix available

[philipp-baumann]

But let's make clear that rix can be used even if nix is not installed, so windows users could install rix on windows (and the dependencies would be easily installed, because binaries for Windows are available) and generate default.nix files that they could then build with Nix on WSL2 or on another machine with Nix available

yes, good point.

[philipp-baumann]

Generally like the restructuring. The only thing I thought was that maybe the part after the intro in the Readme could be a bit crispier in terms of lengh 🚀

[b-rodrigues]

done