Nixpkgs: Does stdenv need to be a derivation?

[Ericson2314]

I'm not quite sure why stdenv is a derivation. I think it would be cleaner for it to just be an attribute set. This might mean migrating some logic from bash in setup.sh to Nix expressions, but that is probably a good thing anyways.

[edolstra]

Historically stdenv has been an installable package that propagates the stdenv tools (e.g. gcc). So it was a convenient way to replicate stdenv in shells, predating nix-shell.

However this appears to be broken at the moment (nix-support/propagated-user-env-packages is empty).

[Ericson2314]

@edolstra Interesting; thanks for the history lesson. Sounds like there is no more need with nix-shell, then?

[edolstra]

It's also used in a few places to include stdenv in VM tests that need to perform a build, e.g.

nixos/tests/containers-ipv4.nix:      virtualisation.pathsInNixDB = [ pkgs.stdenv ];

[Ericson2314]

@edolstra any idea of a work around? It would be nice to programmatically get the build-time dependencies of a derivation, perhaps.

[copumpkin]

It would be nice to programmatically get the build-time dependencies of a derivation, perhaps.

Indeed! https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1245

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