Building soci for nixos

[seanrmurphy]

Hi,

I'm trying to experiment a little with soci and I want to build it for nixos as that's what I use.

I have been able to build the soci CLI and I guess I can build the grpc service (although I have not built it yet).

I encountered a few issues and would appreciate some feedback from you guys on how to deal with them:

• I was unable to use the Makefile fundamentally because the nix build process is quite strict on separating the vendoring process (where network access is required) from the compilation process (where network access is not permitted) - this is not a big issue as I was able to avoid using the Makefile but I was a little confused that one of the build targets in the Makefile is called vendor but it actually does go mod tidy which is quite different from go mod vendor - would it make sense to change the name of the build target to tidy?
• both nix and cgo are v comfortable with use of pkg-config to link to zlib, I had to change this line to // #cgo pkg-config: zlib - I wonder have you guys considered using this?
• I've had problems with the vendoring not working as go.mod in the cmd directory contains a relative link here - this does not play nice with nix - for releases, would it be possible to make this absolute?

My current (incomplete) solution is to pull my version of the repo with the above changes but I think I should be able to modify it to use this repo and apply a couple of changes using sed and perform the build with the standard go tools rather than the Makefile - it's definitely suboptimal but so far has been the only solution that I've found. I think it would be nice if I could at least remove the sed substitution as this feels v brittle obviously.

Would be interested in any thoughts you might have on this.

Thanks, rgds,
Sean.