Work out how to provide SuperDirt quark (and its dependencies) to `scide` out of the box
mitchmindtree opened this issue · 4 comments
Currently, the superdirt-start command uses the -l flag of sclang in order to provide a custom sclang_conf.yaml that includes the SuperDirt quark and its dependencies.
It would be great if we could do something similar for the scide command too which opens the supercollider IDE. Currently, the provided supercollider IDE does not know anything about SuperDirt or its dependencies by default.
Temporary Workaround
In the meantime, this flake provides a superdirt-install command that installs the SuperDirt plugin and its dependencies into the user's supercollider config. If running scide provided by this flake, users should consider running superdirt-install first. Hopefully we can come up with a more declarative alternative that doesn't require the extra install step in the future.
The recent update to the SuperCollider nixpkgs added a wrapper that sets SC's data path, where it looks for plugins:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1ed8857f8d7dcf6711279e643fa6185ea4fdf9b3/pkgs/development/interpreters/supercollider/wrapper.nix#L13
(See below)
My solution to this issue is cloning the Quark repository and copying it into that path, as well as linking all the Quark dependencies there.
https://github.com/ardek66/nix-livecode/blob/master/overlay.nix#L30
This removes the need of a wrapper, and scide will correctly find the plugins and classes. Also I have tested duplicate dependencies and I didn't have any errors.
Also, my flake provides quarks by creating Nix derivations for all the quarks in the repository, as well as automatic dependency solving, to remove the need of using Quarks.install and the like.
Upon a closer look, I have realised that SC_PLUGIN_DIR and SC_DATA_DIR are environment variables added by this patch.
In the patched file, there is also a function that determines the location of the configuration file:
https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider/blob/develop/common/SC_Filesystem_unix.cpp#L119
Replacing XDG_HOME with something like SC_CONFIG_DIR should be trivial to do, and would make it possible for a sclang_conf.yaml to be written by nix and picked up automatically by supercollider, without the need of a wrapper calling sclang separately, and without having to copy the plugins in a directory, which I have to admit is not very Nix-y.
EDIT: I have managed to patch SuperCollider and propagate the paths of each Quark and their dependencies to their own entries in sclang_conf.yaml. IMO this results in a cleaner set of output paths, and it seems to solve the problem of duplicate dependencies, as SC appears to compile every directory only once, so in the case of a path appearing two or more times, its content will only be compiled once.
There's still some stuff I will have to clean up, mostly the buildQuark function and fix the patch so that scide configuration doesn't break, as it can't save in the nix store.
Thanks for sharing your progress!
You might also be interested in some of the discussion in this SC forum post I started about adding support to SuperCollider for additively providing sets of Quarks via CLI or environment variable: