Previously you had to remember to call value->attrs->sort() after
populating value->attrs. Now there is a BindingsBuilder helper that
wraps Bindings and ensures that sort() is called before you can use
it.
nixpkgs can save a good bit of eval memory with this primop. zipAttrsWith is
used quite a bit around nixpkgs (eg in the form of recursiveUpdate), but the
most costly application for this primop is in the module system. it improves
the implementation of zipAttrsWith from nixpkgs by not checking an attribute
multiple times if it occurs more than once in the input list, allocates less
values and set elements, and just avoids many a temporary object in general.
nixpkgs has a more generic version of this operation, zipAttrsWithNames, but
this version is only used once so isn't suitable for being the base of a new
primop. if it were to be used more we should add a second primop instead.
This function is very useful in nixpkgs, but its implementation in Nix
itself is rather slow due to it requiring a lot of attribute set and
list appends.
Moving arguments of the primOp into the registration structure makes it
impossible to initialize a second EvalState with the correct primOp
registration. It will end up registering all those "RegisterPrimOp"'s
with an arity of zero on all but the 2nd instance of the EvalState.
Not moving the memory will add a tiny bit of memory overhead during the
eval since we need a copy of all the argument lists of all the primOp's.
The overhead shouldn't be too bad as it is static (based on the amonut
of registered operations) and only occurs once during the interpreter
startup.
- This change applies to builtins.toXML and inner workings
- Proof of concept:
```nix
let e = builtins.toXML e; in e
```
- Before:
```
$ nix-instantiate --eval poc.nix
error: infinite recursion encountered
```
- After:
```
$ nix-instantiate --eval poc.nix
error: infinite recursion encountered
at /data/github/kamadorueda/nix/poc.nix:1:9:
1| let e = builtins.toXML e; in e
|
```
Since 4806f2f6b0, we can't have paths with
references passed to builtins.{path,filterSource}. This prevents many cases
of those functions called on IFD outputs from working. Resolve this by
passing the references found in the original path to the added path.
Rather than having them plain strings scattered through the whole
codebase, create an enum containing all the known experimental features.
This means that
- Nix can now `warn` when an unkwown experimental feature is passed
(making it much nicer to spot typos and spot deprecated features)
- It’s now easy to remove a feature altogether (once the feature isn’t
experimental anymore or is dropped) by just removing the field for the
enum and letting the compiler point us to all the now invalid usages
of it.
This reverts some parts of commit
8430a8f086 which was trying to rethrow
some exceptions while we weren’t in the context of a `catch` block,
causing some weird “terminate called without an active exception”
errors.
Fix#5368
We now build the context (so this has the side-effect of making
builtins.{path,filterSource} work on derivations outputs, if IFD is
enabled) and then check that the path has no references (which is what
we really care about).
The boolean is only used to determine if the formals are set to a
non-null pointer in all our cases. We can get rid of that allocation and
instead just compare the pointer value with NULL. Saving up to
sizeof(bool) + platform specific alignment per ExprLambda instace.
Probably not a lot of memory but perhaps a few kilobyte with nixpkgs?
This also gets rid of a potential issue with dereferencing formals based on
the value of the boolean that didn't have to be aligned with the formals
pointer but was in all our cases.
I had started the trend of doing `std::visit` by value (because a type
error once mislead me into thinking that was the only form that
existed). While the optomizer in principle should be able to deal with
extra coppying or extra indirection once the lambdas inlined, sticking
with by reference is the conventional default. I hope this might even
improve performance.
I found it somewhat confusing to have an error like
error: attribute 'getFlake' missing
if the required experimental-feature (`flakes`) is not enabled. Instead,
I'd expect Nix to throw an error just like it's the case when using e.g. `nix
flake` without `flakes` being enabled.
With this change, the error looks like this:
$ nix-instantiate -E 'builtins.getFlake "nixpkgs"'
error: Cannot call 'builtins.getFlake' because experimental Nix feature 'flakes' is disabled. You can enable it via '--extra-experimental-features flakes'.
at «string»:1:1:
1| builtins.getFlake "nixpkgs"
| ^
I didn't use `settings.requireExperimentalFeature` here on purpose
because this doesn't contain a position. Also, it doesn't seem as if we
need to catch the error and check for the missing feature here since
this already happens at evaluation time.
With --no-write-lock-file, it's possible that flake.lock is out of
sync with the actual inputs used by the evaluation. So doing fromJSON
(readFile ./flake.lock) will give wrong results.
Fixes#4639.
This fixes a class of crashes and introduces ptr<T> to make the
code robust against this failure mode going forward.
Thanks regnat for the idea of a ref<T> without overhead!
Closes#4895Closes#4893Closes#5127Closes#5113
As described in #4745 it's otherwise fairly hard to understand where
this is coming from. Say you have an expression which uses e.g.
`types.package`:
``` nix
{ outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: {
packages.x86_64-linux.hello = let
foo = nixpkgs.lib.evalModules {
modules = [
{
options.foo.bar = with nixpkgs.lib; mkOption { type = types.package; };
}
{
foo.bar = ./.;
}
];
};
in builtins.trace foo.config.foo.bar.outPath nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.hello;
defaultPackage.x86_64-linux = self.packages.x86_64-linux.hello;
};
}
```
Then you'll get an error trace like this:
```
error: 'builtins.storePath' is not allowed in pure evaluation mode
at /nix/store/p4h2x6r80njkb0j2rc1xjhhl99yri3zb-source/lib/attrsets.nix:328:15:
327| let
328| path' = builtins.storePath path;
| ^
329| res =
… while evaluating the attribute 'config.foo.bar.outPath'
at /nix/store/p4h2x6r80njkb0j2rc1xjhhl99yri3zb-source/lib/attrsets.nix:332:11:
331| name = sanitizeDerivationName (builtins.substring 33 (-1) (baseNameOf path'));
332| outPath = path';
| ^
333| outputs = [ "out" ];
… while evaluating the attribute 'packages.x86_64-linux.hello'
at /nix/store/6c1rfsqzrhjw1235palzjmf5vihcpci7-source/flake.nix:3:5:
2| { outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: {
3| packages.x86_64-linux.hello = let
| ^
4| foo = nixpkgs.lib.evalModules {
```
Fixes#4745
They are equivalent according to
<https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#hard-line-breaks>,
and the trailing spaces tend to be a pain (because the make git
complain, editors tend to want to remove them − the `.editorconfig`
actually specifies that − etc..).
When working on some more complex Nix code, there are sometimes rather
unhelpful or misleading error messages, especially if coerce-errors are
thrown.
This patch is a first steps towards improving that. I'm happy to file
more changes after that, but I'd like to gather some feedback first.
To summarize, this patch does the following things:
* Attrsets (a.k.a. `Bindings` in `libexpr`) now have a `Pos`. This is
helpful e.g. to identify which attribute-set in `listToAttrs` is
invalid.
* The `Value`-struct has a new method named `determinePos` which tries
to guess the position of a value and falls back to a default if that's
not possible.
This can be used to provide better messages if a coercion fails.
* The new `determinePos`-API is used by `builtins.concatMap` now. With
that change, Nix shows the exact position in the error where a wrong
value was returned by the lambda.
To make sure it's still obvious that `concatMap` is the problem,
another stack-frame was added.
* The changes described above can be added to every other `primop`, but
first I'd like to get some feedback about the overall approach.
* The position of the `name`-attribute appears in the trace.
* If e.g. `meta` has no `outPath`-attribute, a `cannot coerce set to
string` error will be thrown where `pos` points to `name =` which is
highly misleading.
This avoids an ambiguity where the `StorePathWithOutputs { drvPath, {}
}` could mean "build `brvPath`" or "substitute `drvPath`" depending on
context.
It also brings the internals closer in line to the new CLI, by
generalizing the `Buildable` type is used there and makes that
distinction already.
In doing so, relegate `StorePathWithOutputs` to being a type just for
backwards compatibility (CLI and RPC).
Example:
error: builder for '/nix/store/9ysqfidhipyzfiy54mh77iqn29j6cpsb-failing.drv' failed with exit code 1;
last 1 log lines:
> FAIL
For full logs, run 'nix log /nix/store/9ysqfidhipyzfiy54mh77iqn29j6cpsb-failing.drv'.
… while importing '/nix/store/pfp4a4bjh642ylxyipncqs03z6kkgfvy-failing'
at /nix/store/25wgzr2qrqqiqfbdb1chpiry221cjglc-source/flake.nix:58:15:
57|
58| ifd = import self.hydraJobs.broken;
| ^
59|
Changes:
* The divider lines are gone. These were in practice a bit confusing,
in particular with --show-trace or --keep-going, since then there
were multiple lines, suggesting a start/end which wasn't the case.
* Instead, multi-line error messages are now indented to align with
the prefix (e.g. "error: ").
* The 'description' field is gone since we weren't really using it.
* 'hint' is renamed to 'msg' since it really wasn't a hint.
* The error is now printed *before* the location info.
* The 'name' field is no longer printed since most of the time it
wasn't very useful since it was just the name of the exception (like
EvalError). Ideally in the future this would be a unique, easily
googleable error ID (like rustc).
* "trace:" is now just "…". This assumes error contexts start with
something like "while doing X".
Example before:
error: --- AssertionError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
assertion 'false' failed
----------------------------------------------------- show-trace -----------------------------------------------------
trace: while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Example after:
error: assertion 'false' failed
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
… while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Move clearValue inside Value
mkInt instead of setInt
mkBool instead of setBool
mkString instead of setString
mkPath instead of setPath
mkNull instead of setNull
mkAttrs instead of setAttrs
mkList instead of setList*
mkThunk instead of setThunk
mkApp instead of setApp
mkLambda instead of setLambda
mkBlackhole instead of setBlackhole
mkPrimOp instead of setPrimOp
mkPrimOpApp instead of setPrimOpApp
mkExternal instead of setExternal
mkFloat instead of setFloat
Add note that the static mk* function should be removed eventually
Rather than storing the derivation outputs as `drvPath!outputName` internally,
store them as `drvHashModulo!outputName` (or `outputHash!outputName` for
fixed-output derivations).
This makes the storage slightly more opaque, but enables an earlier
cutoff in cases where a fixed-output dependency changes (but keeps the
same output hash) − same as what we already do for input-addressed
derivations.
In particular, this means that derivations can output derivations. But
that ramification isn't (yet!) useful as we would want, since there is
no way to have a dependent derivation that is itself a dependent
derivation.
This fixes an error found in builtins.path that looks like:
store path mismatch in (possibly filtered) path added from '/private/tmp/nix-shell.CyXViH/nix-test/filter-source/filterin'
when no hash is specified
This further continues with the dependency inverstion. Also I just went
ahead and exposed `parseDerivation`: it seems like the more proper
building block, and not a bad thing to expose if we are trying to be
less wedded to drv files on disk anywas.
This function was used in only one place, where it could easily be
replaced by readDerivation() since it's not
performance-critical. (This function appears to have been modelled
after queryDerivationOutputs(), which exists only to make the garbage
collector faster.)
fetchTarball, fetchTree, and fetchGit all have *optional* hash attrs.
This means that we need to be careful with what we allow to avoid
accidentally making these defaults. When ‘hash = ""’ we assume the
empty hash is wanted.
follow up of https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/3544
This allows hash="" so that it can be used for debugging purposes. For
instance, this gives you an error message like:
warning: found empty hash, assuming you wanted 'sha256:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000'
hash mismatch in fixed-output derivation '/nix/store/asx6qw1r1xk6iak6y6jph4n58h4hdmbm-nix':
wanted: sha256:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
got: sha256:0fpfhipl9v1mfzw2ffmxiyyzqwlkvww22bh9wcy4qrfslb4jm429
Instead, `Hash` uses `std::optional<HashType>`. In the future, we may
also make `Hash` itself require a known hash type, encoraging people to
use `std::optional<Hash>` instead.
This provides a pluggable mechanism for defining new fetchers. It adds
a builtin function 'fetchTree' that generalizes existing fetchers like
'fetchGit', 'fetchMercurial' and 'fetchTarball'. 'fetchTree' takes a
set of attributes, e.g.
fetchTree {
type = "git";
url = "https://example.org/repo.git";
ref = "some-branch";
rev = "abcdef...";
}
The existing fetchers are just wrappers around this. Note that the
input attributes to fetchTree are the same as flake input
specifications and flake lock file entries.
All fetchers share a common cache stored in
~/.cache/nix/fetcher-cache-v1.sqlite. This replaces the ad hoc caching
mechanisms in fetchGit and download.cc (e.g. ~/.cache/nix/{tarballs,git-revs*}).
This also adds support for Git worktrees (c169ea5904).
This allows querying the location of function arguments. E.g.
builtins.unsafeGetAttrPos "x" (builtins.functionArgs ({ x }: null))
=> { column = 57; file = "/home/infinisil/src/nix/inst/test.nix"; line = 1; }
See documentattion in header and comments in implementation for details.
This is actually done in preparation for floating ca derivations, not
multi-output fixed ca derivations, but the distinction doesn't yet
mattter.
Thanks @cole-h for finding and fixing a bunch of typos.
Fixes
error: derivation '/nix/store/klivma7r7h5lndb99f7xxmlh5whyayvg-zlib-1.2.11.drv' has incorrect output '/nix/store/fv98nnx5ykgbq8sqabilkgkbc4169q05-zlib-1.2.11-dev', should be '/nix/store/adm7pilzlj3z5k249s8b4wv3scprhzi1-zlib-1.2.11-dev'
Most functions now take a StorePath argument rather than a Path (which
is just an alias for std::string). The StorePath constructor ensures
that the path is syntactically correct (i.e. it looks like
<store-dir>/<base32-hash>-<name>). Similarly, functions like
buildPaths() now take a StorePathWithOutputs, rather than abusing Path
by adding a '!<outputs>' suffix.
Note that the StorePath type is implemented in Rust. This involves
some hackery to allow Rust values to be used directly in C++, via a
helper type whose destructor calls the Rust type's drop()
function. The main issue is the dynamic nature of C++ move semantics:
after we have moved a Rust value, we should not call the drop function
on the original value. So when we move a value, we set the original
value to bitwise zero, and the destructor only calls drop() if the
value is not bitwise zero. This should be sufficient for most types.
Also lots of minor cleanups to the C++ API to make it more modern
(e.g. using std::optional and std::string_view in some places).
For text files it is possible to do it like so:
`builtins.hashString "sha256" (builtins.readFile /tmp/a)`
but that doesn't work for binary files.
With builtins.hashFile any kind of file can be conveniently hashed.
Previously, plain derivation paths in the string context (e.g. those
that arose from builtins.storePath on a drv file, not those that arose
from accessing .drvPath of a derivation) were treated somewhat like
derivaiton paths derived from .drvPath, except their dependencies
weren't recursively added to the input set. With this change, such
plain derivation paths are simply treated as paths and added to the
source inputs set accordingly, simplifying context handling code and
removing the inconsistency. If drvPath-like behavior is desired, the
.drv file can be imported and then .drvPath can be accessed.
This is a backwards-incompatibility, but storePath is never used on
drv files within nixpkgs and almost never used elsewhere.
SRI hashes (https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/) combine the hash algorithm and
a base-64 hash. This allows more concise and standard hash
specifications. For example, instead of
import <nix/fetchurl.nl> {
url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
sha256 = "5d22dad058d5c800d65a115f919da22938c50dd6ba98c5e3a183172d149840a4";
};
you can write
import <nix/fetchurl.nl> {
url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
hash = "sha256-XSLa0FjVyADWWhFfkZ2iKTjFDda6mMXjoYMXLRSYQKQ=";
};
In fixed-output derivations, the outputHashAlgo is no longer mandatory
if outputHash specifies the hash (either as an SRI or in the old
"<type>:<hash>" format).
'nix hash-{file,path}' now print hashes in SRI format by default. I
also reverted them to use SHA-256 by default because that's what we're
using most of the time in Nixpkgs.
Suggested by @zimbatm.
forceValue() were called after a value is copied effectively forcing only one of the copies keeping another copy not evaluated.
This resulted in its evaluation of the same lazy value more than once (the number of hits is not big though)
Otherwise, running e.g.
nix-instantiate --eval -E --strict 'builtins.replaceStrings [""] ["X"] "abc"'
would just hang in an infinite loop.
Found by afl-fuzz.
First attempt of this was reverted in e2d71bd186 because it caused
another infinite loop, which is fixed now and a test added.
Otherwise, running e.g.
nix-instantiate --eval -E --strict 'builtins.replaceStrings [""] ["X"] "abc"'
would just hang in an infinite loop.
Found by afl-fuzz.
Instead of having lexicographicOrder() create a temporary sorted array
of Attr*:s and copying attr names from that, copy the attr names
first and then sort that.
builtins.path allows specifying the name of a path (which makes paths
with store-illegal names now addable), allows adding paths with flat
instead of recursive hashes, allows specifying a filter (so is a
generalization of filterSource), and allows specifying an expected
hash (enabling safe path adding in pure mode).
In this mode, the following restrictions apply:
* The builtins currentTime, currentSystem and storePath throw an
error.
* $NIX_PATH and -I are ignored.
* fetchGit and fetchMercurial require a revision hash.
* fetchurl and fetchTarball require a sha256 attribute.
* No file system access is allowed outside of the paths returned by
fetch{Git,Mercurial,url,Tarball}. Thus 'nix build -f ./foo.nix' is
not allowed.
Thus, the evaluation result is completely reproducible from the
command line arguments. E.g.
nix build --pure-eval '(
let
nix = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; rev = "9c927de4b179a6dd210dd88d34bda8af4b575680"; };
nixpkgs = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; ref = "release-17.09"; rev = "66b4de79e3841530e6d9c6baf98702aa1f7124e4"; };
in (import (nix + "/release.nix") { inherit nix nixpkgs; }).build.x86_64-linux
)'
The goal is to enable completely reproducible and traceable
evaluation. For example, a NixOS configuration could be fully
described by a single Git commit hash. 'nixos-rebuild' would do
something like
nix build --pure-eval '(
(import (fetchGit { url = file:///my-nixos-config; rev = "..."; })).system
')
where the Git repository /my-nixos-config would use further fetchGit
calls or Git externals to fetch Nixpkgs and whatever other
dependencies it has. Either way, the commit hash would uniquely
identify the NixOS configuration and allow it to reproduced.
The computation of urlHash didn't take the name into account, so
subsequent fetchurl calls with the same URL but a different name would
resolve to the same cached store path.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.
There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:
* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching
Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.
The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).
Previously, all derivation attributes had to be coerced into strings
so that they could be passed via the environment. This is lossy
(e.g. lists get flattened, necessitating configureFlags
vs. configureFlagsArray, of which the latter cannot be specified as an
attribute), doesn't support attribute sets at all, and has size
limitations (necessitating hacks like passAsFile).
This patch adds a new mode for passing attributes to builders, namely
encoded as a JSON file ".attrs.json" in the current directory of the
builder. This mode is activated via the special attribute
__structuredAttrs = true;
(The idea is that one day we can set this in stdenv.mkDerivation.)
For example,
stdenv.mkDerivation {
__structuredAttrs = true;
name = "foo";
buildInputs = [ pkgs.hello pkgs.cowsay ];
doCheck = true;
hardening.format = false;
}
results in a ".attrs.json" file containing (sans the indentation):
{
"buildInputs": [],
"builder": "/nix/store/ygl61ycpr2vjqrx775l1r2mw1g2rb754-bash-4.3-p48/bin/bash",
"configureFlags": [
"--with-foo",
"--with-bar=1 2"
],
"doCheck": true,
"hardening": {
"format": false
},
"name": "foo",
"nativeBuildInputs": [
"/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"/nix/store/4jnvjin0r6wp6cv1hdm5jbkx3vinlcvk-cowsay-3.03"
],
"propagatedBuildInputs": [],
"propagatedNativeBuildInputs": [],
"stdenv": "/nix/store/f3hw3p8armnzy6xhd4h8s7anfjrs15n2-stdenv",
"system": "x86_64-linux"
}
"passAsFile" is ignored in this mode because it's not needed - large
strings are included directly in the JSON representation.
It is up to the builder to do something with the JSON
representation. For example, in bash-based builders, lists/attrsets of
string values could be mapped to bash (associative) arrays.
On some architectures (like x86_64 or i686, but not ARM for example)
overflow during integer division causes a crash due to SIGFPE.
Reproduces on a 64-bit system with:
nix-instantiate --eval -E '(-9223372036854775807 - 1) / -1'
The only way this can happen is when the smallest possible integer is
divided by -1, so just special-case that.
The binary cache store can now use HTTP/2 to do lookups. This is much
more efficient than HTTP/1.1 due to multiplexing: we can issue many
requests in parallel over a single TCP connection. Thus it's no longer
necessary to use a bunch of concurrent TCP connections (25 by
default).
For example, downloading 802 .narinfo files from
https://cache.nixos.org/, using a single TCP connection, takes 11.8s
with HTTP/1.1, but only 0.61s with HTTP/2.
This did require a fairly substantial rewrite of the Downloader class
to use the curl multi interface, because otherwise curl wouldn't be
able to do multiplexing for us. As a bonus, we get connection reuse
even with HTTP/1.1. All downloads are now handled by a single worker
thread. Clients call Downloader::enqueueDownload() to tell the worker
thread to start the download, getting a std::future to the result.
The implementation of "partition" in Nixpkgs is O(n^2) (because of the
use of ++), and for some reason was causing stack overflows in
multi-threaded evaluation (not sure why).
This reduces "nix-env -qa --drv-path" runtime by 0.197s and memory
usage by 298 MiB (in non-Boehm mode).
For example, you can now say:
configureFlags = "--prefix=${placeholder "out"} --includedir=${placeholder "dev"}";
The strings returned by the ‘placeholder’ builtin are replaced at
build time by the actual store paths corresponding to the specified
outputs.
Previously, you had to work around the inability to self-reference by doing stuff like:
preConfigure = ''
configureFlags+=" --prefix $out --includedir=$dev"
'';
or rely on ad-hoc variable interpolation semantics in Autoconf or Make
(e.g. --prefix=\$(out)), which doesn't always work.
Thus, -I / $NIX_PATH entries are now downloaded only when they are
needed for evaluation. An error to download an entry is a non-fatal
warning (just like non-existant paths).
This does change the semantics of builtins.nixPath, which now returns
the original, rather than resulting path. E.g., before we had
[ { path = "/nix/store/hgm3yxf1lrrwa3z14zpqaj5p9vs0qklk-nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
but now
[ { path = "https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.03/nixexprs.tar.xz"; prefix = "nixpkgs"; } ... ]
Fixes#792.
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
Also show types when nix cannot compare values of different types.
This is also more consistent since types are already shown when comparing values of the same not comparable type.
The value pointers of lists with 1 or 2 elements are now stored in the
list value itself. In particular, this makes the "concatMap (x: if
cond then [(f x)] else [])" idiom cheaper.
This is because we don't want to do HTTP requests on every evaluation,
even though we can prevent a full redownload via the cached ETag. The
default is one hour.
This function downloads and unpacks the given URL at evaluation
time. This is primarily intended to make it easier to deal with Nix
expressions that have external dependencies. For instance, to fetch
Nixpkgs 14.12:
with import (fetchTarball https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-14.12.tar.gz) {};
Or to fetch a specific revision:
with import (fetchTarball 2766a4b44e.tar.gz) {};
This patch also adds a ‘fetchurl’ builtin that downloads but doesn't
unpack its argument. Not sure if it's useful though.
