Check out what the bintools wrapper does, which puts the unwrapped stuff on the PATH but with lower priority.

I don't know whether that's any better/worse than this, but it would be nice if they both worked consistently, whatever way we choose.

Thank you. I didn't know that there was a similar issue in binutils and it was already solved. I like the solution with priorities more than symlinking, because it doesn't require enumerating all the programs. In theory it may work properly even if new commands are added/removed.

Looks like what is needed is:

1. Whenever gcc wrapper is installed, install also unwrapped gcc. After quick searching I see this can be done by using nix-support/propagated-user-env-packages.
2. Somehow assign priorities (meta.priority) so wrapped gcc has higher priority then unwrapped.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand how these priorities work for bintuils. In pkgs/development/tools/misc/binutils/default.nix I see this line:

    /* Give binutils a lower priority than gcc-wrapper to prevent a
       collision due to the ld/as wrappers/symlinks in the latter. */
    priority = 10;

Ok, 10 is priority for unwrapped binutils. But then in pkgs/build-support/bintools-wrapper/default.nix (as I understand wrapper for bintuils) we have this:

  meta =
    let bintools_ = if bintools != null then bintools else {}; in
    (if bintools_ ? meta then removeAttrs bintools.meta ["priority"] else {}) //
    { description =
        stdenv.lib.attrByPath ["meta" "description"] "System binary utilities" bintools_
        + " (wrapper script)";
      priority = 10;
  } // optionalAttrs useMacosReexportHack {
    platforms = stdenv.lib.platforms.darwin;
  };

So the priority is set to 10 too. I think I don't quite understand how wrapped bintutils get higher priority than unwrapped.

Oh, I thought this was about during builds too, but I see with https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/build-support/cc-wrapper/setup-hook.sh#L91-L94 (and a corresponding line in bintools-wrapper) that's already fixed. Then for consistency we with those we should definitely do it the extra-dep (not extra wrapper) way.

I can't say I understand that thing in the meta either, but maybe just try it? If it works for one it should work for the other, right?

I marked this as stale due to inactivity. → More info