On Wed, 2025-09-03 at 12:42 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote: > > For example, use case we have: using nix-shell to lock down the software > > used to build, for reproducible builds and similar reasons. Without -- > > pure, PATH may still contain (last!) software from the system itself, > > but it should basically never be used. > > if the PATH is mangled, you'll have a lot more problems than just > building docs as it will pick wrong exec files anyway. Err, no? To search a binary, directories in $PATH are meant to be searched in order of appearance. It's well-defined which one you pick for which, and this setup takes advantage of that (with a rather long $PATH) to control the binaries used for the build. > In the particular case of docs, if you have, for instance, two different > python versions, one with sphinx and another one without it, it may pick > the wrong one, causing the build to fail. There's nothing the build system > can do to solve it. The proper fix would be to wrap the calling logic > to save the env before running under nix-shell, restoring env afterwards. I don't follow. If this setup breaks the build then that's good, I'll fix the env. If the build does magic inside and sort of ignores $PATH, that's bad. johannes
