09:30 <dinosaure> sterni: hope that MirageOS 4 will help you :) I'm not an expert of NixOS but we definitely should put more effort on that (may be I should switch to NixOS :p)

09:55 <sterni> dinosaure: I'm optimistic :) so far only good things have come from more dune

09:55 <sterni> it's just a shame that dune can't handle C libs apparently?

09:56 <sterni> when packaging all the freestanding stuff for mirage I always run into the issue that they want to get the prefix for pkg-config from opam which is a bit of an annoyance

09:58 <hannes> sterni: ..and tada.wav... this is changing with MirageOS4 as well (since then solo5/ocaml-freestanding is a cross-compilation toolchain, and dune + cross-compilation is used --> no need for pkg-config anymore \o/)

09:59 <hannes> the Makefile solution stems from older dune releases where we did not have control over C flags, and dune always added -fPIC, which we do not want in certain scenarios

10:03 <sterni> hannes: actually I'm kinda dreading no more pkg-config depending on how it will work because with our nix package builder environment pkg-config just works™

10:03 <sterni> https://github.com/Solo5/solo5/pull/494#issuecomment-808301001

10:04 <hannes> sterni: in the MirageOS ecosystem we used pkg-config only to pass around CFLAGS, which we'll now do by solo5 installing the toolchain (plus some dune magic IIRC)

10:04 <sterni> I see yeah

10:05 <sterni> I mean as long as dune takes care of stuff it's probably okay because it is usually pretty respectful

10:05 <sterni> and I guess it'll reuse OCAMLPATH to find the C libraries?

10:09 <hannes> sterni: with the monorepo approach, it just compiles everything in CWD and doesn't need to find anything

10:10 <hannes> well, maybe the ocaml runtime and nolibc and libm - not sure which mechanism is used for that.

10:13 <dinosaure> sterni: yes, on this point we trust specifically on `dune` to get the right path to our ocaml-freestanding runtime

10:14 <dinosaure> so, we use `findlib.conf`/`dune`/`OCAMLPATH`. I'm not really aware about the dune mechanism however

10:16 <sterni> I think it mostly reuses OCAMLPATH and checks the dune-package file pretty much

10:16 <sterni> at least we don't have anything special for making dune work in nixpkgs afaik

10:18 <dinosaure> cool :) and yeah, MirageOS 4 will definitely help us :)

11:04 <sterni> also on nixos I guess we just need to make it better for OCaml so everybody comes pooring over :p

11:05 <sterni> I'd be hesitant to oversell it since using opam for OCaml development is still arguably better

11:06 <sterni> but I guess it's the distro to be on according to repology no one really has that much OCaml packaged and you can have dev environments without opam and such

11:06 <sterni> but we are basically maintaining a package set independently from opam and we don't have multiple versions of packages nor a SAT solver so stuff breaks more often

12:10 <sterni> in other news: I've managed to build the stub_resolver unikernel for the xen target with nix

12:11 <sterni> I guess I'll have to setup xen now to see if it *actually* works

12:11 <sterni> but it compiles

12:19 <dinosaure> "if it compiles, it works" ;)

12:20 <sterni> that's the promise at leats :p

12:27 <sterni> I was gonna enable xen on my laptop quickly but it doesn't support efi?!

12:27 <sterni> or at least on nixos it doesn't

13:18 <sterni> PoC currently looks like this: https://github.com/sternenseemann/nixpkgs/commit/0855154580430f7b459be5f3a50141f0838a0c11#diff-b9ad5a870156edc895d3602259df6eac57153596e91e08320464200b615b7bef

13:19 <sterni> but I guess I'm not gonna work on this too much further until mirageos 4

13:19 <sterni> maybe package mirage-solo5 until then