Unable to install Nix

[bradley-heather]

Describe the bug
Unable to install Nix on MacOS Catalina

Terminal Output

---- sudo execution ------------------------------------------------------------
I am executing:

$ sudo /usr/bin/ex /etc/synthetic.conf

to add Nix to /etc/synthetic.conf

---- oh no! --------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeeze, something went wrong. If you can take all the output and open
an issue, we'd love to fix the problem so nobody else has this issue.

:(

What should my next step be? Thanks!!

[abathur]

There's likely something unexpected about your environment, but it may take a few rounds of picking at it...

• Is this a first-time install, or a reinstall?
• Normal mac hardware? VM?
• Do you already have an /etc/synthetic.conf? if so, what's in it, and what does ls -la /etc/synthetic.conf say?
• What was the install command?

[bradley-heather]

Thanks for getting back to me!

• its a reinstall
• normal mac hardware
• i did have a /etc/synthetic.conf. It only had nix in it. I removed it and tried again and it still didn't work.
• I tried installing with Daemon and without. Using the curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh command.

[abathur]

It may be easier to iterate on this in real-time, if you can join the macOS room on the NixOS Matrix.

In either case, running the command that fails directly may help clarify what's going on (ideally in bash):

/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/ex /etc/synthetic.conf <<EOF
:a
nix
.
:x
EOF

[bradley-heather]

Thanks, I've joined the room.

It seems that that is not where the failure lies as I can run that command and it executes fine.

[abathur]

After quite the slog today, we finally shook the problem loose:

Something in the vim startup/plugin files on this system causes /usr/bin/ex (which the installer uses to edit a few files) to quietly exit with an error code, despite successfully editing the file.

The error code halts the installer, but the correctly-edited file sends us off on a goose-chase for problems between this line and the next printing statement. I'll address in a PR soon.

[borkdude]

I had exactly the same problem.

[soulomoon]

I have the same problem, have a clean vim configuration and temporally rename ~/.vim/plugin to anything helps in my situation.

[jj0b]

I also ran into this, and I got around it by temporarily renaming my ~/.vim directory.