The current docs are all "how to do things" and no "what is Nix" or "why
are things the way they are".
I see lots of misconception on the wider internet, and I also think we
would benefit from a "living document" to answer some questions people
currently turn to the thesis for.
I think a new section of the manual can address all these issues.
it is out of date, all over the place in level of detail, is really
about `nixpkgs`, and in general instructions should not be part of
a reference manual.
also:
- update redirects and internal links
- use "Nix language" consistently
Before #5150 the copy-to-store phase of the install was idempotent,
but the recursive cp isn't. This is probably baiting a few people
into trying corrective installs that will fail.
Added using the following sed scripts:
- For command-ref/opt-common.md:
s~- `(--?)([^`]+)`~- [`\1\2`]{#opt-\2}~g
- For expressions/builtin-constants.md:
s~- `(builtins\.?)([^`]+)`~- [`\1\2`]{#builtins-\2}~g
- For expressions/advanced-attributes.md
s~^ - `([^`]+)`~ - [`\1`]{#adv-attr-\1}~g
and manually adjusted outputHashAlgo & outputHashMode.
- For glossary.md
s~^ - (`([^`]+)`|(.+)) ?\\~ - [\1]{#gloss-\2\3}\\~g;
s~(gloss-\w+) ~\1-~g
and manually adjusted anchors for Nix expression, user environment, NAR, ∅ and ε.
- For command-ref/env-common.md
s~^ - `([^`]+)`~ - [`\1`]{#env-\1}~g'
Add a new `file` fetcher type, which will fetch a plain file over
http(s), or from the local file.
Because plain `http(s)://` or `file://` urls can already correspond to
`tarball` inputs (if the path ends-up with a know archive extension),
the URL parsing logic is a bit convuluted in that:
- {http,https,file}:// urls will be interpreted as either a tarball or a
file input, depending on the extensions of the path part (so
`https://foo.com/bar` will be a `file` input and
`https://foo.com/bar.tar.gz` as a `tarball` input)
- `file+{something}://` urls will be interpreted as `file` urls (with
the `file+` part removed)
- `tarball+{something}://` urls will be interpreted as `tarball` urls (with
the `tarball+` part removed)
Fix#3785
Co-Authored-By: Tony Olagbaiye <me@fron.io>
