* docs: unify documentation on search paths
- put all the information on search path semantics into `builtins.findFile`
- put all the information on determining the value of `builtins.nixPath` into the
`nix-path` setting
maybe `builtins.nixPath` is a better place for this, but those bits
can still be moved around now that it's all next to each other.
- link to the syntax page for lookup paths from all places that are
concerned with it
- add or clarify examples
- add a test verifying a claim from documentation
We should use a metric that weighs the related issues.
Counterbalancing time doesn't make much sense to me.
If it's around for longer, the fix will be relevant to more people.
* manual: Contributing -> Development, Hacking -> Building
what's currently called "hacking" are really instructions for setting up
a development environment and compiling from source. we have
a contribution guide in the repo (which rightly focuses on GitHub
workflows), and the material in the manual is more about working
on the code itself.
since we'd otherwise have three headings that amount to "Building Nix",
this change also moves the "classic Nix" instructions to the top.
we may want to reorganise this in the future, and bring
contributor-oriented information closer to the code, but for now let's
stick to more accurate names to ease navigation.
On some systems, previous usage of `match` may cause a stackoverflow
(presumably due to the large size of the match result). Avoid this by
(ab)using `replaceStrings` to test for containment without using
regexes, thereby avoiding the issue. The causal configuration seems to
be the stack size hard limit, which e.g. Amazon Linux sets, whereas most
Linux distros leave unlimited.
Match the fn name to similar fn in nixpkgs.lib, but different
implementation that does not use `match`. This impl gives perhaps
unexpected results when the needle is `""`, but the scope of this is
narrow and that case is a bit odd anyway.
This makes for some duplication-of-work as we do a different
`replaceStrings` if this one is true, but this only runs during doc
generation at build time so has no runtime impact.
See https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/11085 for details.
move together all syntactic and semantic information into one
page, and add a page on data types, which in turn links to the syntax and
semantics.
also split out the note on scoping rules into its own page.
Co-authored-by: Ryan Hendrickson <ryan.hendrickson@alum.mit.edu>
