Isn't modprobe a Linux-specific binary anyways? It shouldn't need any abstraction.

Thanks!

@dezgeg

Isn't modprobe a Linux-specific binary anyways? It shouldn't need any abstraction

Right now that's mostly true. It is still useful for shell scripts, etc. that only need "modprobe" or other tools. Also, most people don't know that "kmod" provides userspace modprobe - so having it here is an easy way for users to fix "modprobe not found" errors. Definitely will wait before these commands make sense tree wide.

Success on x86_64-linux (full log)

Attempted: unixtools.modprobe

these derivations will be built:
  /nix/store/pbnv94ssxyk6kb9hgbgxdghji190cfsk-modprobe.drv
building path(s) ‘/nix/store/h91p1774xsmcqramrrrrscwn4mv51yv2-modprobe’
/nix/store/h91p1774xsmcqramrrrrscwn4mv51yv2-modprobe

I think adding Linux-only commands to unixtools somewhat defeats the purpose of unixtools: it becomes easy again to write something Linux-only without explicitly specifying it.

Success on aarch64-linux (full log)

Attempted: unixtools.modprobe

these derivations will be built:
  /nix/store/58rjik2ykcryldb4m2f9l4xxjqfi5gvi-modprobe.drv
building '/nix/store/58rjik2ykcryldb4m2f9l4xxjqfi5gvi-modprobe.drv'...
/nix/store/8dnpl9z79ljjbn56qg2b4qja64rf8l54-modprobe

I somewhat agree- although there are some binaries where it's not exactly clear if they are truly Linux-only. For instance, all of these only have Linux versions:

• eject
• logger
• modprobe
• mount
• umount
• wall

I think modprobe is the only one that is truly Linux only.

And of course modprobe also has analogs on other platforms.

But what is the point of having unixtools at all? I thought the idea was precisely to make the scripts that fail on other unix platforms break on linux in the same way,

I guess the main point of unixtools is to just provide Unix-standardized tools that should be available in every Unixy platform. Mostly, I want to get rid of all of the if stdenv.isDarwin then darwin.x else utillinux stuff.

Right now, everything in Linux should stay the same. "utillinux", "nettools", and "procps" will have all of the binaries they have always had (in Linux at least- Darwin uses unixtools versions) . Eventually I want to break some of these scripts, but the initial PR was just to provide the above. I was probably too quick in adding modprobe. I didn't realize that Linux was the only system that had it.

Interestingly, autofs had always taken modprobe from utillinux: 3e84cbc

logger, mount, umount and wall are all specified in POSIX, so I'm pretty certain there will be other implementations of those :).

Which is why it is bad to add them to unixtools but only in Linux flavour: it is easy to assume that referring to them doesn't hurt portability…