I think the our `flake.nix` is currently too large and too scary looking.
I think this matters --- if Nix cannot dog-food itself in a way that is
elegant, why should other people have confidence that their own code can
be elegant and easy to maintain?
We could do this at many points in time, but I think around now, when we
are thinking about stabilizing parts of Flakes, is an especially good
time.
This is a first step to make the `flake.nix` smaller, and make
individual components responsible for their own packaging. I hope we can
do this many more follow-ups like it, until the top-level `flake.nix` is
very small and just coordinates between other things.
I think it is bad for these reasons when `tests/` contains a mix of
functional and integration tests
- Concepts is harder to understand, the documentation makes a good
unit vs functional vs integration distinction, but when the
integration tests are just two subdirs within `tests/` this is not
clear.
- Source filtering in the `flake.nix` is more complex. We need to
filter out some of the dirs from `tests/`, rather than simply pick
the dirs we want and take all of them. This is a good sign the
structure of what we are trying to do is not matching the structure
of the files.
With this change we have a clean:
```shell-session
$ git show 'HEAD:tests'
tree HEAD:tests
functional/
installer/
nixos/
```
A couple of tests require building some libraries that depend on Nix,
and assume it to be built locally.
Don't run these if we only want to run the install tests.
This prevents the CI from rebuilding several times Nix (like in
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/actions/runs/6404422275/job/17384964033#step:6:6412), thus removing a fair amount of build time.
the `term` output mode leaves inline HTML around verbatim, while `nroff`
mode (used for `man` pages) does not.
the correct solution would be to pre-render all output with a more
benign tool so we have less liabilities in our own code, but this has to
do for now.
This has been the behaviour before Nix 2.4. It was dropped in a rewrite
in 759947bf72, allowing the creation of
store paths that aren't considered valid by older Nix versions or other
Nix tooling.
Nix 2.4 didn't ship in NixOS until 22.05, and stdenv.mkDerivation in
nixpkgs drops leading periods since April 2022, so it's unlikely anyone
is relying on the current lax behaviour.
Closes#9091.
Change-Id: I4a57bd9899e1b0dba56870ae5a1b680918a18ce9
This was somewhat of a false alarm. The problem was not that the
protocol implementation actually failed to round trip, but that two of
the fields were ignored entirely --- not serialized and deserialized at
all.
For reference, those fields were added in
fa68eb367e.
This reverts commit 5e3986f59c. This
un-implements RFC 92 but fixes the critical bug #9052 which many people
are hitting. This is a decent stop-gap until a minimal reproduction of
that bug is found and a proper fix can be made.
Mostly fixed#9052, but I would like to leave that issue open until we
have a regression test, so I can then properly fix the bug (unbreaking
RFC 92) later.
this addresses that we're too often running into open-ended discussions
about attempts to solve problems where neither the problem nor the
solution is well-understood enough to make decisions in a reasonable
amount of time.
this also prevents us from doing more work asynchronously.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
In #4770 I implemented proper `nix-shell(1)` support for derivations
using `__structuredAttrs = true;`. Back then we decided to introduce two
new environment variables, `NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE` for `.attrs.sh` and
`NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE` for `.attrs.json`. This was to avoid having to
copy these files to `$NIX_BUILD_TOP` in a `nix-shell(1)` session which
effectively meant copying these files to the project dir without
cleaning up afterwords[1].
On last NixCon I resumed hacking on `__structuredAttrs = true;` by
default for `nixpkgs` with a few other folks and getting back to it,
I identified a few problems with the how it's used in `nixpkgs`:
* A lot of builders in `nixpkgs` don't care about the env vars and
assume that `.attrs.sh` and `.attrs.json` are in `$NIX_BUILD_TOP`.
The sole reason why this works is that `nix-shell(1)` sources
the contents of `.attrs.sh` and then sources `$stdenv/setup` if it
exists. This may not be pretty, but it mostly works. One notable
difference when using nixpkgs' stdenv as of now is however that
`$__structuredAttrs` is set to `1` on regular builds, but set to
an empty string in a shell session.
Also, `.attrs.json` cannot be used in shell sessions because
it can only be accessed by `$NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE` and not by
`$NIX_BUILD_TOP/.attrs.json`.
I considered changing Nix to be compatible with what nixpkgs
effectively does, but then we'd have to either move $NIX_BUILD_TOP for
shell sessions to a temporary location (and thus breaking a lot of
assumptions) or we'd reintroduce all the problems we solved back then
by using these two env vars.
This is partly because I didn't document these variables back
then (mea culpa), so I decided to drop all mentions of
`.attrs.{json,sh}` in the manual and only refer to `$NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE`
and `$NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE`. The same applies to all our integration tests.
Theoretically we could deprecated using `"$NIX_BUILD_TOP"/.attrs.sh` in
the future now.
* `nix develop` and `nix print-dev-env` don't support this environment
variable at all even though they're supposed to be part of the replacement
for `nix-shell` - for the drv debugging part to be precise.
This isn't a big deal for the vast majority of derivations, i.e.
derivations relying on nixpkgs' `stdenv` wiring things together
properly. This is because `nix develop` effectively "clones" the
derivation and replaces the builder with a script that dumps all of
the environment, shell variables, functions etc, so the state of
structured attrs being "sourced" is transmitted into the dev shell and
most of the time you don't need to worry about `.attrs.sh` not
existing because the shell is correctly configured and the
if [ -e .attrs.sh ]; then source .attrs.sh; fi
is simply omitted.
However, this will break when having a derivation that reads e.g. from
`.attrs.json` like
with import <nixpkgs> {};
runCommand "foo" { __structuredAttrs = true; foo.bar = 23; } ''
cat $NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE # doesn't work because it points to /build/.attrs.json
''
To work around this I employed a similar approach as it exists for
`nix-shell`: the `NIX_ATTRS_{JSON,SH}_FILE` vars are replaced with
temporary locations.
The contents of `.attrs.sh` and `.attrs.json` are now written into the
JSON by `get-env.sh`, the builder that `nix develop` injects into the
derivation it's debugging. So finally the exact file contents are
present and exported by `nix develop`.
I also made `.attrs.json` a JSON string in the JSON printed by
`get-env.sh` on purpose because then it's not necessary to serialize
the object structure again. `nix develop` only needs the JSON
as string because it's only written into the temporary file.
I'm not entirely sure if it makes sense to also use a temporary
location for `nix print-dev-env` (rather than just skipping the
rewrite in there), but this would probably break certain cases where
it's relied upon `$NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE` to exist (prime example are the
`nix print-dev-env` test-cases I wrote in this patch using
`tests/shell.nix`, these would fail because the env var exists, but it
cannot read from it).
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4770#issuecomment-836799719
this moves the orientation step to the beginning, and adds notes how to
make sure that a problem is well-spefified and the according change more
likely to get accepted
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
