Re: ALSA MIDI is not working under NixOS

On 9/22/25 12:39, Paul Gofman wrote:
> On 9/22/25 12:37, Marc-Aurel Zent wrote:
>>> On 22. Sep 2025, at 20:31, Paul Gofman <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 9/22/25 12:14, Elizabeth Figura wrote:
>>>> On the other hand, I am reminded of an unrelated bug, involving a 
>>>> program (I don't have the name unfortunately) which copies 
>>>> ws2_32.dll to a temp file with a randomly generated name and 
>>>> attempts to load the copy. This fails on Wine because ws2_32 has a 
>>>> unixlib, and we derive the name of the unixlib from the path of the 
>>>> DLL. In order to fix this bug we would probably need to embed the 
>>>> name of the unixlib in the DLL itself rather than relying on its 
>>>> path. If we did that the DLLs for winepulse and winealsa would no 
>>>> longer be identical.
>>>>
>>> That doesn't look quite related to the discussed issue? This part is 
>>> about how we find Unix library. I didn't check exactly this case 
>>> lately but doesn't Wine search for Unix libraries in the configured 
>>> or determined on start Wine paths now? I'd guess it might just work?
>>>
>>>
>>> For the original issue, having the same inodes for different files 
>>> looks clearly like a bug in NixOS to me. First, yes, if there are 
>>> two differently named files they are different files even if the 
>>> contents happens to be the same. For one, the contents is identical 
>>> right now but may change, and if those are differently named files 
>>> the contents is not synchronous between those. Then, inode is 
>>> supposed to be unique within the same file system: 
>>> https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/inode.7.html, "Inode number": 
>>> "Each file in a filesystem has a unique inode number.".
>>>
>>>
>> I think they can mostly get away with this because the nix store is 
>> by design read-only (and there are in practice many duplicates 
>> there). Though I agree that such a form of deduplication should 
>> happen on the filesystem layer ideally.
>
> But also I don't quite understand from the description why that 
> happens to winepulse.drv and winealsa.drv, these files are not 
> indentical and have different contents??
>
In any case, different files can't have same inode number in the same FS 
outside of a bug. The same file may have different names hardlinked to 
the same file. Inode is exactly what identifies the file per se on Unix 
filesystems.