go-webkit2 on nixos

3 jun 2015

motivation

i wanted to package webloop on nixos and since the software is kind of broken i can’t complete that task but if someone wants to look into it, here is what i’ve done so far.

current status

on [1] i’ve packaged the following software:

  • webkitgtk-2.8.3
  • gojs
  • gotk2
  • go-webkit2

the main issue i’m facing right now is that i’m forcing gojs/go-webkit2:

gojs:
sed -i 's,javascriptcoregtk-3.0,javascriptcoregtk-4.0,g'  go/src/github.com/sqs/gojs/base.go

go-webkit2:
sed -i 's,webkit2gtk-3.0,webkit2gtk-4.0,g' go/src/github.com/sourcegraph/go-webkit2/webkit2/webview.go

into using javascriptcoregtk-4.0 and webkit2gtk-4.0 for which they were not designed. it might be not much work to update gojs / go-webkit2 to make proper use of these libraries but i can’t do that at the moment.

the bug report is at [2].

conclusion

some final works on go on nixos: i’m loving it:

  • go makes vast use of git repositories (altough i would wish authors to create more releases/tags instead of just using any random git revision number)
  • go only requires GOPATH
  • go emphasises unit tests and has a very clean and easy to use methology
  • go 1.3 and 1.4 are already packaged for nixos and are very usable already

i would recommend everyone to look into go on nixos as it seems to be a great fit on nixos. this holds also true if you use nix on other POSIX platforms like mac os x or basically any other linux.

thanks to lethalman as he was helping me so much with getting into go packaging!

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