the conversion procedure is simple:
- find all things that look like options, ie calls to either `mkOption`
or `lib.mkOption` that take an attrset. remember the attrset as the
option
- for all options, find a `description` attribute who's value is not a
call to `mdDoc` or `lib.mdDoc`
- textually convert the entire value of the attribute to MD with a few
simple regexes (the set from mdize-module.sh)
- if the change produced a change in the manual output, discard
- if the change kept the manual unchanged, add some text to the
description to make sure we've actually found an option. if the
manual changes this time, keep the converted description
this procedure converts 80% of nixos options to markdown. around 2000
options remain to be inspected, but most of those fail the "does not
change the manual output check": currently the MD conversion process
does not faithfully convert docbook tags like <code> and <package>, so
any option using such tags will not be converted at all.
The latest release of libyamlcpp in nixpkgs does not build because it
uses an older version of boost than the one in nixpkgs and therefore
expects a particular header file which does not exist in the latest
boost anymore. For this reason, a later (git) version of libyamlcpp is
used here (which actually doesn't even require boost).
The substituteInPlace in the prePatch phase is needed because libevdev
places its headers in non-standard places, meaning Nix cannot normally
find them. The `cut` command removes the first two "-I" characters from
the output of `pkg-config`. This needs to be in the prePatch phase
because otherwise Nix will patch these lines to `/var/empty`, meaning
you would have less specific replacement (in case other lines are also
patched to `/var/empty`).
I wrote the patch. (I believe it is NixOS specific.)
