Packaging Ark and Positron for NixOS

[b-rodrigues]

Hello

I've been trying to package Positron for NixOS. My first attempt was to use the deb package and patch to make it work for NixOS, which wasn't successful. So now I'm trying to build it from source. During the build process it turns out that it checks for Ark, and if it's not found then the user gets prompted to install it automatically.

This however can't work for NixOS, as builds happen in a sandbox without internet connection, to ensure reproducibility. So assets and dependencies need to be downloaded and built beforehand.

So now I've built Ark, here's the expression that builds it.

I got it working in a jupyter notebook session, and it seems to work, but I was wondering what else I should do to properly test the build (independently from positron). Is there a series of tests that I should/could run?

[jmcphers]

Nice work! As you probably discovered, you can just build Ark alongside Positron and it'll use that instead of trying to download from Github.

There are a number of automated tests you can run on Positron. The best place to learn about these is in the Github workflows (in .github/workflows). Here's a few you can try on your build:

positron/.github/workflows/ci.yml

Lines 71 to 95 in 08986c1

	- name: Compile and Download
	run: yarn npm-run-all --max-old-space-size=4095 -lp compile "electron x64" playwright-install download-builtin-extensions
	- name: Compile Integration Tests
	run: yarn --cwd test/integration/browser compile
	- name: Run Unit Tests (Electron)
	run: .\scripts\test.bat
	- name: Run Unit Tests (node.js)
	run: yarn test-node
	- name: Run Unit Tests (Browser, Chromium)
	run: yarn test-browser-no-install --browser chromium
	- name: Run Integration Tests (Electron)
	run: .\scripts\test-integration.bat
	- name: Run Integration Tests (Browser, Firefox)
	timeout-minutes: 20
	run: .\scripts\test-web-integration.bat --browser firefox
	- name: Run Integration Tests (Remote)
	timeout-minutes: 20
	run: .\scripts\test-remote-integration.bat