nix build fails

[Philipp-M]

Summary

When building helix via nix with e.g.

nix build .

it fails with basically this:

error: Cannot find Git revision '4d5b141017c61fe7e168e0a5c5721ee62b0d9572' in ref 'HEAD' of repository 'https://gitlab.com/spade-lang/tree-sitter-spade'! Please make sure that the rev exists on the ref you've specified or add allRefs = true; to fetchGit.

I haven't looked too deep into this yet, but I could get it to build when I change rev to ref in the languages.toml in spade:

 [[grammar]]
 name = "spade"
-source = { git = "https://gitlab.com/spade-lang/tree-sitter-spade", rev = "4d5b141017c61fe7e168e0a5c5721ee62b0d9572" }
+source = { git = "https://gitlab.com/spade-lang/tree-sitter-spade", ref = "4d5b141017c61fe7e168e0a5c5721ee62b0d9572" }
 
 [[language]]
 name = "amber"

Reproduction Steps

nix build .

Helix log

No response

Platform

NixOS unstable

Terminal Emulator

kitty

Installation Method

nix build with helix master

Helix Version

24.07-347-g91a5d407

[the-mikedavis]

What is your nix --version? I built with nix build on 2.24.10 successfully

[Philipp-M]

That's interesting, I have the same version 2.24.10

It could well be that you somehow have this cached in the nix store already, I haven't had issues on a different machine too... Though I wonder how it came to the nix store in the first place. It might be reproducible after garbage-collecting, or explicitly removing that store entry?

[the-mikedavis]

Ok I cleared out my references to Helix, removed ~/.cache/nix (in case the download was cached), unset the Cachix substituter, did a garbage collection run and reran nix build and it passed.

The only other thing that comes to mind is maybe the git version? Shallow-cloning a repo at an exact revision is a somewhat recent feature in git so maybe if your git is old it can't request that revision from gitlab

[Philipp-M]

Thanks for investigating this (as I haven't found time yet).

The only other thing that comes to mind is maybe the git version? Shallow-cloning a repo at an exact revision is a somewhat recent feature in git so maybe if your git is old it can't request that revision from gitlab

Hmm good hint, I unfortunately don't have access to the machine until next year where I got the issues, IIRC the nixpkgs there were from the end of October and I just checked, it should be version 2.46.1, while on the machine where it works it's 2.47, so you might be right when it was added in 2.47 (on a quick google I haven't found the release note for this though).