xattrs not available in nix builds

[pmahoney]

This is more of a heads-up than an issue or feature request.

I wanted to try packaging "please" for nixpkgs, but it's going to be difficult since nix disables xattrs within builds It appears the reasons for disabling them would not apply to "please" (other than desire to support filesystems that lack xattrs), but they are disabled at any rate.

[peterebden]

Hmmmmm OK. Not sure what a good alternative would be; we used to use a separate file but moved to xattrs to avoid risks of it getting out of sync with the real ones.

Thanks for the heads up!

[georgegiovanni]

What about a way to at least create output (plz-out) elsewhere (not in the same dir as src)? AWS EFS also doesn't support xattrs.

[peterebden]

Have discussed that a bit; seems legit but just quite a bit of work to make everything aware of it.

[swills]

Also experiencing this issue on FreeBSD using tmpfs, a memory based filesystem which doesn't support xattrs.

[katzdm]

This also impacts various MacOS virtualization systems (docker-on-mac, virtualbox).

[hzeller]

@pmahoney Did you consider packaging please for nix after this was resolved ?

[pmahoney]

@hzeller No, and I do not currently have plans to package please.