Provide development environment via nix

[niklasmohrin]

This is a working version for #2191. We use poetry and poetry2nix for Python dependencies. For nodejs, we (for now) just install node through nix and then use npm ci as before. Leftover tasks / questions:

• CI: we probably want to use https://install.determinate.systems/
• Windows: we should look up the PowerShell commands needed to install WSL 2 etc. and provide them somewhere so that the first time setup for first semester students goes quicker; edit: Now we just recommend podman instead of WSL
• we should check the Podman example setup on different platforms
• should we recommend https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL instead of using Ubuntu WSL with nix? I think that if people set up their first WSL box, they won't be happy to fight with NixOS later; edit: We decided: No
• ... (to be continued)

[richardebeling]

Code looks good to me. Will re-test setup on Windows and Ubuntu.

[richardebeling]

• wsl --install -d Ubuntu-24.04 on a WSL-disabled Windows with the Image uninstalled from the App store (~= fresh installation) downloads the distro image, but doesn't register/initialize it. It has to be run again after reboot

  • It will just register Ubuntu-24.04 after the reboot and immediately run it, so it seems acceptable
  • Proposal: Extend readme comment: (you may have to restart your computer, and you may need to re-run the command afterwards if you get an error)

• wsl will open a shell in the current directory, which might be mounted ntfs

  • run .#services(-full) will then exit immediately upon (quiet) failure about unix sockets.
  • Proposal: Add a comment to the readme: **Windows users**: Make sure you are not in the mounted NTFS filesystem when cloning.

• in wsl, on non-mounted directory, compilemessages still errors about msgfmt missing

  • looks to me as if the gettext package is a dependency for the shell, but not for the services
  • @niklasmohrin can you fix this?

• On laptop (slow, but not as slow as some surface tablets we will see), nix develop took >13min, mostly in tests.

  • same laptop: docker vagrant provisioning passed in 5m21, so almost a 3x slowdown for dev-setup
  • especially python3.10-cherrypy-18.10.0 seems to take very long, some tests seem to be stuck on timers/mutexes/without cpu utilization?
  • Ryzen Octacore still takes 6m49
  • I think this was faster the last time I tested it? Don't know what happened. In any case, disabling the tests would be hugely beneficial, I think. Can we somehow get official cached populated for these pyton dependencies with python3.10?

• running services with --detached can, on error, just appear as "stuck without message" or even "succeeded" (observed: wsl socket error, gettext error, when retrying: localsettings.py already existed). It's not intuitive to debug. I'm sorry for bringing this up again, but I'd vote to just run nix run .#services-full in foreground.

Apart from these, everything seems to work.

[richardebeling]

Thanks! :)

[niklasmohrin]

Side note: Got a CI failure with seed 1953118040, but couldn't reproduce locally: https://github.com/e-valuation/EvaP/actions/runs/11225675155/job/31204789097?pr=2274

Happened again on main with seed 7524442357. This time though, it also happens locally!