Nix build system for ardupilot

[gsubmarine]

No description provided.

[bugeats]

Hey a nix build! Nice. I have some scraps of nix in my local ardupilot, but it was left unfinished.

One of the issues I ran into was that not all of the python packages have nix packages. I ended up trying to use mach-nix to leverage requirements.txt like so:

      defaultPackage = forAllSystems (system: pkgs: mach-nix.lib."${system}".mkPython {
        requirements = ''
          flake8
          future
          geocoder
          intelhex
          lxml
          MAVProxy
          pexpect
          pygame
          pymavlink
        '';
      });

[peterbarker]

To accept this it would need to be tucked away somewhere innocuous - Tools/nix, for example, with patches and whatnot underneath that.

I'm concerned by an out-sized maintenance burden for this vs the number of people likely to use it. The encoding of paths, locations, git hashes and various other bits and pieces in here looks like serious headache.

@gsubmarine do you really want to push for this to go in? I have reservations, but @magicrub seems to be OK with the concept. I can take this to a DevCall to see what other people think about it if you'd like (not that I seriously understand the benefits this would bring to the project, mind you) - I can really only understand the drawbacks from the PR :-)

[gsubmarine]

To accept this it would need to be tucked away somewhere innocuous - Tools/nix, for example, with patches and whatnot underneath that.

I'm concerned by an out-sized maintenance burden for this vs the number of people likely to use it. The encoding of paths, locations, git hashes and various other bits and pieces in here looks like serious headache.

@gsubmarine do you really want to push for this to go in? I have reservations, but @magicrub seems to be OK with the concept. I can take this to a DevCall to see what other people think about it if you'd like (not that I seriously understand the benefits this would bring to the project, mind you) - I can really only understand the drawbacks from the PR :-)

Hey @peterbarker :)

Happy to clean it up and tuck it away. Agree the patch is gross, i wish there was another way!

Here's my case for pushing forward --

1. Nix is awesome. Getting more traction. I know a few companies that use nix and ardupilot together and would use this ardusim impl.
2. The beauty of nix is it's deterministic. This implementation will always work because all of the inputs are fixed. So i'm less worried about the maintenance burden.

Let me know if you're ok with it and i'll add a commit to tuck it away in Tools/nix.

Thanks for support @magicrub.

[khancyr]

That isn't our toolchain

[khancyr]

? Not need

[khancyr]

That is wrong, fix the build environment to build correctly...

[khancyr]

Seems files to add to gitignore

[gsubmarine]

Need to point to this side branch until this fix goes in: #29121