Installing packages via jpm on NixOS

[nstgc]

NixOS newbie here!

I installed janet and jpm by declaring them in environment.systemPackages, but when I try sudo jpm install spork I'm informed that the Nix Store is read-only (same error without sudo, too). I know that is the way of NixOS and appreciate it as a good thing, but it does complicate the task at hand.

For those using NixOS, how do you work around this? One thing I'm considering is building from source and running it from ~/.local/bin. I already have environment.localBinInPath = true; set.

[ianthehenry]

Can you use jpm -l install spork instead of installing packages globally?

If you do want to globally install packages, you might be able to set a different global JANET_TREE / JANET_PATH in a writeable directory, or modify the derivation to change the default.

(I recall there was some problem a couple years ago building native binaries on NixOS because the jpm derivation was just configured to expect it to be installed to the same root directory as janet... but maybe this is fixed now.)

[nstgc]

That does sound like it should work. Thanks!

[nstgc]

Actually, this does not seem to work. (Finally getting around to trying again. 😅 ) I'm told janet.h doesn't exist.

What I ended up doing is installing from source into my ~/.local. Much as I prefer having things managed by my package manager, I've been managing things manually for over a year now on Arch.

[sogaiu]

Possibly of interest is this comment.

[nstgc]

Ooh, fancy. That's probably beyond me at the moment, but definitely the direction I think I should go in. Thanks!