This allows using an arbitrary "provides" attribute from the specified
flake. For example:
nix build --flake nixpkgs packages.hello
(Maybe provides.packages should be used for consistency...)
We want to encourage a brave new world of hermetic evaluation for
source-level reproducibility, so flakes should not poke around in the
filesystem outside of their explicit dependencies.
Note that the default installation source remains impure in that it
can refer to mutable flakes, so "nix build nixpkgs.hello" still works
(and fetches the latest nixpkgs, unless it has been pinned by the
user).
A problem with pure evaluation is that builtins.currentSystem is
unavailable. For the moment, I've hard-coded "x86_64-linux" in the
nixpkgs flake. Eventually, "system" should be a flake function
argument.
For example, github:edolstra/dwarffs is more-or-less equivalent to
https://github.com/edolstra/dwarffs.git. It's a much faster way to get
GitHub repositories: it fetches tarballs rather than entire Git
repositories. It also allows fetching specific revisions by hash
without specifying a ref (e.g. a branch name):
github:edolstra/dwarffs/41c0c1bf292ea3ac3858ff393b49ca1123dbd553
Since macOS 10.14 this has become an error, causing problems if the
nix-daemon loads nix during substitution (this is a forked process).
Workaround for #2523.
This reverts commit a0ef21262f. This
doesn't work in 'nix run' and nix-shell because setns() fails in
multithreaded programs, and Boehm GC mark threads are uncancellable.
Fixes#2646.
Inside a derivation, exportReferencesGraph already provides a way to
dump the Nix database for a specific closure. On the command line,
--dump-db gave us the same information, but only for the entire Nix
database at once.
With this change, one can now pass a list of paths to --dump-db to get
the Nix database dumped for just those paths. (The user is responsible
for ensuring this is a closure, like for --export).
Among other things, this is useful for deploying a closure to a new
host without using --import/--export; one can use tar to transfer the
store paths, and --dump-db/--load-db to transfer the validity
information. This is useful if the new host doesn't actually have Nix
yet, and the closure that is being deployed itself contains Nix.
- The instructions for using nix-shell as an interpreter has a Haskell script
example that doesn't work on more recent versions of Nix. Update the
instructions with a working command
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.
