add shell.nix

[shmish111]

I had issues get everything working on my mac but nix helped and this shell.nix should work on linux as well.

[edwinb]

Thanks for getting this working. I'm not really sure this is the right place for it though, especially given that I'm not in a position to maintain it (or even really understand it to be honest) myself, and given that there's potentially lots of distribution mechanisms and I can't support all of them.

What do other people think? (Assuming anyone else is reading :)) How do other projects deal with this kind of thing?

[kristleifur]

Personally I like to have this sort of thing in repos, but under a miscellaneous tools directory - and explicitly unsupported but well documented.

I’ve found that dependency setup scripts or definitions can be rather useful in how they capture the context of setting things up. Even if they may turn into archaeological snapshots. This is a little like a blog post that tells how to set things up – except it can be run.

I’d like to request the author to add documentation to this though :)

[shmish111]

It at least provides documentation of some sort about what is required to be installed on your system (actually I should change the PR because bazel is in there from me playing around). Would you like me to add some comments in the nix file or something?

Currently nix is the most complete package manager for Idris and seems to be quite popular (admittedly Idris developers are a pretty small sample :-) ) so I think it should be considered somewhat relevant and it is likely that someone will play around with Blodwen who uses nix (other than me).

As an aside, look into nix!

[clayrat]

Nix sometimes behaves mysteriously when used to build Idris projects - we've repeatedly ran into a situation where the build was failing with something like Nat not found or Vect not found. The solution in these cases was to reorder import statements so that the offending import went to the bottom of the list.

[bbarker]

👍 for putting it in the repo, even if not maintained. If someone comes along and is a nix user, and notices it is broken, then they will at least have a good starting point to fix it.

Of course at some point it will be good to have Blodwen in the nixpkgs repo, but that is more for releases, whereas this shell.nix is handy for building what is in the repo.