nix-super/doc/manual/src/expressions/generic-builder.md

# Generic Builder Syntax

Recall from [???](#ex-hello-builder) that the builder looked something
like this:

    PATH=$perl/bin:$PATH
    tar xvfz $src
    cd hello-*
    ./configure --prefix=$out
    make
    make install

The builders for almost all Unix packages look like this — set up some
environment variables, unpack the sources, configure, build, and
install. For this reason the standard environment provides some Bash
functions that automate the build process. Here is what a builder using
the generic build facilities looks like:

    buildInputs="$perl" ①
    
    source $stdenv/setup ②
    
    genericBuild ③

Here is what each line means:

1.  The `buildInputs` variable tells `setup` to use the indicated
    packages as “inputs”. This means that if a package provides a `bin`
    subdirectory, it's added to `PATH`; if it has a `include`
    subdirectory, it's added to GCC's header search path; and so
    on.\[1\]

2.  The function `genericBuild` is defined in the file `$stdenv/setup`.

3.  The final step calls the shell function `genericBuild`, which
    performs the steps that were done explicitly in
    [???](#ex-hello-builder). The generic builder is smart enough to
    figure out whether to unpack the sources using `gzip`, `bzip2`, etc.
    It can be customised in many ways; see the Nixpkgs manual for
    details.

Discerning readers will note that the `buildInputs` could just as well
have been set in the Nix expression, like this:

``` 
  buildInputs = [ perl ];
```

The `perl` attribute can then be removed, and the builder becomes even
shorter:

    source $stdenv/setup
    genericBuild

In fact, `mkDerivation` provides a default builder that looks exactly
like that, so it is actually possible to omit the builder for Hello
entirely.

1.  How does it work? `setup` tries to source the file
    `pkg/nix-support/setup-hook` of all dependencies. These “setup
    hooks” can then set up whatever environment variables they want;
    for instance, the setup hook for Perl sets the `PERL5LIB`
    environment variable to contain the `lib/site_perl` directories of
    all inputs.