Comment by Kim_Bruning

8 months ago

Hrrm.

   legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.ladybird (0-unstable-2024-06-04)

Cool! Let's see if I can read HN.

  nix run nixpkgs#ladybird

  ...

  502144.831 Ladybird(1297933): WebContent process crashed!
  502144.831 Ladybird(1297933): WebContent has crashed 5 times in quick succession! Not restarting...

  ...

I didn't expect it to work very well yet in a distro, so that's ok. It's cool enough that nix(os) has already started tracking it.

I'll check back every few months and see how it's going!

3 comments

Kim_Bruning

Reply
awesomekling  8 months ago

Please don't trust random distro packages of Ladybird, we have no idea what they're packaging, but it's unlikely to be current, and not something we can help you with.

I wish distros would not package pre-alpha software, since the only thing it accomplishes is giving people a bad first impression of something that isn't ready :(

If you want to mess with Ladybird, build it from the source at https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird :)

  • jchw  8 months ago

    I think the only reason why Nixpkgs has a derivation for Ladybird is because it is not really possible to build Ladybird (or really almost any software) the "obvious" way in NixOS. What Nixpkgs provides is more like build recipes that work within Nix's sandboxed environment with optionally cached binaries, rather than actual packages. Because of that, it's kind of awkward: no specific decision is ever made to publish packages for some unfinished software, it's just that the act of writing a derivation kind of implicitly does do that.

    Clearly, some upstreams do not appreciate that NixOS provides non-standard or sometimes-unfinished versions of their software, but it's either that or the software is essentially unusable and uncompilable on NixOS.

    I do wonder if there is a potential for productive compromise, though. Maybe it would be desirable to have a QMessageBox warning to the user at startup that the distribution is unsupported and bugs should not be reported upstream. I think that the folks maintaining the Ladybird derivation would be happy to take feedback into account.