A [recent-ish change](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/6676) logs a warning when a potentially counterintuitive situation happens.
This now causes the multi-user installer to [emit a warning](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/189043) when it's doing
the "seed the Nix database" step via a low-level `nix-store --load-db` invocation.
`nix-store` functionality implementations don't actually use profiles or channels or homedir as far as i can tell. So why are we
hitting this code at all?
Well, the current command approach for functionality here builds a [fat `nix` binary](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/src/nix/local.mk#L23-L26) which has _all_ the functionality of
previous individual binaries (nix-env, nix-store, etc) bundled in, then [uses the invocation name](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/blob/master/src/nix/main.cc#L274-L277) to select the
set of commands to expose. `nix` itself has this behavior, even when just trying to parse the (sub)command and arguments:
```
dave @ davembp2
$ nix
error: no subcommand specified
Try 'nix --help' for more information.
dave @ davembp2
$ sudo nix
warning: $HOME ('/Users/dave') is not owned by you, falling back to the one defined in the 'passwd' file
error: no subcommand specified
Try 'nix --help' for more information.
dave @ davembp2
$ HOME=~root sudo nix
error: no subcommand specified
Try 'nix --help' for more information.
```
This behavior can also be seen pretty easily with an arbitrary `nix-store` invocation:
```
dave @ davembp2
$ nix-store --realize
dave @ davembp2
$ sudo nix-store --realize # what installer is doing now
warning: $HOME ('/Users/dave') is not owned by you, falling back to the one defined in the 'passwd' file
dave @ davembp2
$ sudo HOME=~root nix-store --realize # what this PR effectively does
dave @ davembp2
$
```
User on Matrix reported install problems which presented as
"vifs:editing error" which we traced back to vim griping about an
existing swap file. When opened interactively, it did this:
E325: ATTENTION
Found a swap file by the name "/etc/.fstab.swp"
owned by: root dated: Sön Apr 24 16:54:10 2022
file name: /private/etc/fstab
modified: YES
user name: root host name: MBP.local
process ID: 1698
While opening file "/etc/fstab"
dated: Sön Apr 24 16:56:27 2022
NEWER than swap file!
...
On Linux a user can go through all the way through the multi-user install
and find out at the end that they now have to manually configure their
init system to launch the nix daemon.
I suspect that for a significant number of users this is not
what they wanted. They might prefer a single-user install.
Now they have to manually uninstall nix before they can
go through the single-user install.
This introduces a confirmation dialog before the install
in that specific situation to make sure that they want to proceed.
See also: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4999#issuecomment-1064188080
This closes#4999 but rejecting it and closing that issue anyways
would also be valid.
While `create_directories()` from install-multi-user.sh seems to already
create parts of the directory structure, it's marked as deprecated, and
it won't hurt also copying over the tmpfiles config and have it execute
once.
Same as 1fd127a068, but applied to a
code path (volume_pass_works -> verify_volume_pass) that the reporting
user didn't hit and wasn't able to trigger manually. I am not certain
but I suspect it will be easier to add prophylactically than to debug
if its absence causes trouble some day.
While trying to figure out how `nix-env`/`nix profile` work I had a hard
time understand how man pages were being installed.
Took me quite some time to figure this out, thought it might be useful
to others too!
Fixes#6122, which reports a problem with trying to run the installer
under another user (probably: user is not the disk "owner" and thus
can't mount the volume).
The script is trying to find chown in a cross-platform-like
way, but there's some sort of deficiency in `command -p` in
the default macOS bash 3.2. It looks like it will just use
whatever PATH is already set, instead of the "default" path.
This attempts to hard-set a PATH via `getconf PATH`. It will
just set an empty PATH if that fails for some reason. A
properly-functioning `command -p` should not care what we
set the PATH to here one way or the other.
Hopefully fixes#5768.
Same purpose as de9efa3b79af7886fcf2a67b6ce97d4f96a57421
For some unclear reason, we get occasional reports from people who do
not have /usr/sbin on their PATH that the installer fails. It's a
standard part of the PATH, so I have no clue what they're doing to
remove it--but it's also fairly cheap to avoid.
Add a regular github action that will check the status of the latest
hydra evaluation.
Things aren’t ideal right now because this job will only notify “the
user who last modified the cron syntax in the workflow file” (so myself
atm). But at least that’ll give a notification for failing hydra jobs
We had a macOS user present in Matrix with some confusion because the
lack of a clear task statement here made them think the error meant
that a problem had occurred during the preceding task in a macOS
install: "Fixing any leftover Nix volume state"
This adds an explicit unmount of the store volume to avoid cases
where the installer can hang in await_volume when:
- the user already has a store volume
- that volume is already mounted somewhere other than /nix
- they do not take a path through the installer that results in an
explicit unmount (as both removing and encrypting the volume
would do)
ShellCheck correctly warns:
In scripts/install-nix-from-closure.sh line 218:
echo -e "\nif [ -e $p ]; then . $p; fi # added by Nix installer" >> "$fn"
^-- SC3037: In POSIX sh, echo flags are undefined.
In scripts/install-nix-from-closure.sh line 229:
echo -e "\nif [ -e $p ]; then . $p; fi # added by Nix installer" >> "$fn"
^-- SC3037: In POSIX sh, echo flags are undefined.
Indeed, this actually breaks on Ubuntu where /bin/sh is dash.
Fixes#5458.
Signed-off-by: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
As reported in #5198, volume creation can fail with a permission error
for some macOS users (probably secondary user accounts?) Sudo appears
to be sufficient to avoid this.
While I'm here, I also updated the sudo invocation added in 079bde2ae
to use the _sudo explanation wrapper.
