the manual led me to think I could run "nixos-option --install" without starting X

[zooko]

Following http://hydra.nixos.org/build/3660875/download/1/nixos/manual.html, I skipped step 5, since it sounded like an optional step. When I subsequently ran "nixos-option --install", it failed with: "error: attribute `config.install' missing". Later, when I did step 5 and ran "start xserver" then "nixos-option --install" succeeded.

To close this ticket, either:

a) make it so that starting the xserver is not necessary for "nixos-option --install" to work. (Why this is currently the case is a mystery to me.)

or

b) change the manual.html to specify that step 5 is non-optional

[nbp]

I would be extremely surprised if nixos-option depends on xorg, because this is a simple script shell with a few sed & nix-instantiate commands in it.

The only reason might be that the shell is not started with the right environment variable which would also surprised me knowing that we have test for testing the install procedure from a non-graphical CD (http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nixos/trunk).

The only reason why it might show the error message “error: attribute `config.install' missing” is when you forget to put the "--" in front of the install name. So you have probably run "nixos-option install" instead of "nixos-option --install" when you used the non-graphical CD.

If you can reproduce it then we should probably investigate how to reproduce it in the test suite.