Nix alternative (again)

[SR-G]

So i think this is a recurrent topic ... but what is the current status of neuron as a binary execution / outside nix ?

It seems that :

• regular binaries where considered (Static binaries for releases #183)
• Nix alternative were considered (Any options other than Nix? #243, with pre-requesites done in the meanwhile), also related to Build static binaries on Linux #417
• but then have been discontinued (if i'm not mistaken)

In my situation, i have an Obsidian set of .md that i would like to convert to HTML. Neuron seems perfect for this (about the workflow it would allow + the final result). I'm running windows (WSL), but sadly can't use the docker image. So i'm just in need of a statically compiled binary (with glibc).

So, isn't it possible to just have either again static binaries (the latest one released here on github is quite old), either another package manager than Nix ?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[srid]

@SR-G The static builds are in broken state, pending someone volunteering to fix it.

If you already have WSL (WSL 2, I hope), then why not install it via Nix since Nix is supported on WSL?

[bew]

while /bin/hello indicates the path of the executable relative to hello that you want to run

AFAIK this means that in the package 'hello' (that is built by nix-bundle by running nix build or sth similar), it will take the binary at bin/hello (the leading / representing the root of the generated package).

You said earlier that you had to download 6G of data to build neuron, I suspect that it didn't found binary caches and tried to recompile the world..
Could you paste the output of nix-channel --list ? (maybe with sudo if that commands doesn't print anything, meaning you installed Nix system-wide (with a daemon) and not user-wide)

[SR-G]

With root is doesn't print anything, with current user :
nixpkgs https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable

Of course i have the neuron binary inside nix cache :

whereis neuron
neuron: /nix/store/s2kc0agagr35f70dqkzpar3kjdhn5mm5-user-environment/bin/neuron

Indeed based on the /nix/* content, it has downloaded the world (glibc, gcc, bash, binutils, gtk, ...)

[srid]

/bin/neuron looks correct - but I think the first argument should be the nix expression that uses the default.nix in this repo. See the removed commands in this commit for a working version:

1d5cbba#diff-944291df2c9c06359d37cc8833d182d705c9e8c3108e7cfe132d61a06e9133dd

[bew]

@srid FYI I tried to build it statically to test what you meant by 'it-needs-fixes', but as it tried to recompile the world statically I stopped it. I don't want to build the world, then have something break at the end and require me to recompile everything again..
Could you give bit more info about what's broken / at which stage it doesn't work / etc? (And make an issue, so you/we can track this 😃)

[srid]

Well, it should compile the world only the first time - then the packages are cached, and when you re-run nix-build it should reuse the cache. I usually start leaving it running overnight and then check again in the morning :-)

Looks to be NixOS/nixpkgs#118731

[ouuan]

Just curious, @srid how large is your /nix directory? Are you using NixOS?

I'm using Nix for nothing but neuron, and now my /nix is 9GiB, which is half of everything in my root directory except /home and /nix. Run only nix-env -if to install neuron takes 6GiB. Executing bin/run & trying to build the static binary file and then aborting the build take more.

[srid]

Yup, this is why we need #626 (then you won't need nix as an user)

Generally speaking, to derive most value from Nix - you would be using it for many other packages as well. This is what I do on Windows (when on WSL2) or Linux (via NixOS). Not what you asked for, but you can try NixOS in lieu of your current $distro to see what difference that makes (virtually nothing in /usr, due to everything being shared under /nix).