What's needed for Catalina?

[dhess]

What's required to get nix-darwin working with Catalina? Here, I mean just nix-darwin-specific issues, not the nixpkgs issues as discussed in NixOS/nix#2925

In #nix-darwin on Freenode, user cransom suggested that a /run entry in synthetic.conf is needed. Also, he claims that synthetic.conf requires hard tabs, rather than spaces.

Any other issues? Let's catalogue them here.

[mroi]

Any details as to why /run is needed? It was not needed before Catalina.

Apart from the setup problems in NixOS/nix#2925, I don’t have any issues with my Nix setup on Catalina.

Edit: Stupid me. This project is not about ordinary Catalina. Forget what I said.

[dhess]

nix-darwin has relied on /run since I've been using it. Just grep the source tree for numerous examples of where and how it's used.

[dhess]

This seems relevant:

NixOS/nix#3125

[alanpearce]

I added a line to /etc/synthetic.conf after following the instructions for nix like so:

run	/System/Volumes/Data/private/var/run/

I don't know if it's the correct destination, I just know it should be private/var/run from some $PWD, based upon this:

nix-darwin/pkgs/darwin-installer/configuration.nix

Line 56 in 132a7f0

sudo ln -sfn private/var/run /run

After a reboot, the installer worked, I'm just encountering some build issues switching to my real configuration.

[LnL7]

The main reason for using /run was consistency with nixos, it isn't strictly necessary and could be moved or even made configurable if needed.

[steshaw]

I added a line to /etc/synthetic.conf after following the instructions for nix like so:

run	/System/Volumes/Data/private/var/run/

Yep, looks like that works.

I don't know if it's the correct destination, I just know it should be private/var/run from some $PWD, based upon this:

nix-darwin/pkgs/darwin-installer/configuration.nix

Line 56 in 132a7f0

sudo ln -sfn private/var/run /run

It seems that putting a relative directory into synthetic.conf works fine too:

run	/System/Volumes/Data/private/var/run/

man synthetic.conf states:

synthetic.conf describes virtual symbolic links and empty directories to be created at the root mount point

The installer (and docs for manual installation) could use:

printf 'run\tprivate/var/run\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf

However, that does require a reboot, so if nix-darwin can be changed to use /private/var/run directly, maybe that's the way to go?

[dhess]

fonts.enableFontDir fails on Catalina because the Nix store is now on a separate filesystem.

[srid]

Installation of nix-darwin is currently broken on Catalina:

error: the path '/nix' is a symlink; this is not allowed for the Nix store and its parent directories

[cmacrae]

@srid You can mitigate this by setting NIX_IGNORE_SYMLINK_STORE=1 🙃

[LnL7]

Yeah, the nix build from my installer branch will get overwritten with pkgs.nix by default.

[ashkan-leo]

I finally was able to install nix on Catalina.
I tried to install nix-darwin, but I have issues creating /run. I added run /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/run/ to /etc/synthetic.conf, but I'm still unable to create /run.

I used the script in NixOS/nix#3212 to install Nix (script is authored by @LnL7). Any chance a similar approach can be taken here?

[LnL7]

Yeah, except in this case a symlink is fine and was already the default in the installer.

echo "run\tprivate/var/run" | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf
/System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources/apfs.util -B