Unable to pull all Haskell dependencies from Nix store

[input-output-hk]

Unable to pull all Haskell dependencies from Nix store

[morganthomas]

Chloe Kever (@pinktrink) has been assigned to work on this.

[morganthomas]

This is still unresolved and nobody is currently working on it as far as I know. For CI, our solution was to run the nix-build and not check the development toolchain for the nix-shell. This is proving to be less than ideal as a solution, because as my Nix expert tells me, nix-shell and nix-build are substantially different environments in this case, and I would agree with this assessment, since the nix-build environment contains all the needed dependencies pulled from the Nix store and the nix-shell environment does not. It is for this reason that I want to test the nix-shell in CI, to ensure that the development toolchain is working, since the nix-build working is not a sufficient condition for the toolchain in the nix-shell to work. This is something we have encountered as an issue in practice. I do not have an efficient solution for testing the nix-shell toolchain in CI and so for now I am not doing it.

[ak3n]

Thanks for the update! And sorry for no replies for so long.

I tried to take a look at it in July and the hypothesis was that plutus-starter uses an outdated commit without proper hydra packages cache which would explain the behaviour as the cache of hydra gets cleaned periodically. But something went wrong (I guess the difference between nix-shell and nix-build) and I had to switch to other tasks.

In general you chose the "right" tactic. Usually people use nix-build for CI as it properly reuses all the dependencies and is designed for reproducible builds. As nix-shell creates an environment that might be less consistent or up-to-date with cabal dependencies. Usually nix-shell development toolchain is tested everytime a developer tries to do something. So it makes less sense to test it on CI.

I hope you don't mind if I will close the issue as it less related to plutus-apps and more about the nix specifics.