More purity in native stdenvs?

[vcunat]

Is there any reason why we use native tools (like sed) in native stdenvs? I understand that some things need to be native (e.g. libc), but otherwise it seems to me to strive for as much purity as possible.

I thought this was the case already, found out after discussion about perl on darwin http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/11363

I would propose a PR myself, but I've never used any "native" platform, so I'm certainly not a good person for this.

[peti]

Yes, native stdenv tends to have /usr/local/bin in $PATH, which causes a lot of trouble. It would be great to clean that up. Alas, it's a lot of effort ...

[danieroux]

What is the work involved in this? What would be the "quick win" that gets it 80% there?

[vcunat]

I suspect that on darwin/freebsd it would be enough to take the generic non-native stdenv, only with native libc. That should be easy to try, but I don't have a clue if there is some other part which needs to be native on those platforms.

[shlevy]

FYI, I've started #1484 targeted for our second 2014 release cycle

[shlevy]

I'm going to take responsibility for darwin over the next few months. Is there anyone willing to pick up the other non-Linuxes?

[zimbatm]

Closing because this issue doesn't have a clear outcome. Please re-open and let me know if I'm overstepping.