‘x = <expr>’ is short for ‘:a { x = <expr>; }’. Note that the
right-hand side refers to the original scope, so you get:
nix-repl> x = 1
nix-repl> x = x + 1
nix-repl> x
2
rather than an infinite recursion.
Example:
$ nix-repl '<nixos>'
> config.services.xserver.desktop<TAB>
comletes to
> config.services.xserver.desktopManager
You also get suggestions if there are multiple matches:
> config.services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4
config.services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4.enable
config.services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4.phononBackends
As discovered by Todd Veldhuizen, the shell started by nix-shell has
its affinity set to a single CPU. This is because nix-shell connects
to the Nix daemon, which causes the affinity hack to be applied. So
we turn this off for Perl programs.
This is equivalent to running ‘nix-env -e '*'’ first, except that it
happens in a single transaction. Thus, ‘nix-env -i pkgs...’ replaces
the profile with the specified set of packages.
The main motivation is to support declarative package management
(similar to environment.systemPackages in NixOS). That is, if you
have a specification ‘profile.nix’ like this:
with import <nixpkgs> {};
[ thunderbird
geeqie
...
]
then after any change to ‘profile.nix’, you can run:
$ nix-env -f profile.nix -ir
to update the profile to match the specification. (Without the ‘-r’
flag, if you remove a package from ‘profile.nix’, it won't be removed
from the actual profile.)
Suggested by @zefhemel.
This prevents some duplicate evaluation in nix-env and
nix-instantiate.
Also, when traversing ~/.nix-defexpr, only read regular files with the
extension .nix. Previously it was reading files like
.../channels/binary-caches/<name>. The only reason this didn't cause
problems is pure luck (namely, <name> shadows an actual Nix
expression, the binary-caches files happen to be syntactically valid
Nix expressions, and we iterate over the directory contents in just
the right order).
Since we already cache files in normal form (fileEvalCache), caching
parse trees is redundant.
Note that getting rid of this cache doesn't actually save much memory
at the moment, because parse trees are currently not freed / GC'ed.
The command ":a <expr>" evaluates <expr> and adds the attributes in
the resulting attribute set to the interpreter scope. For instance:
nix-repl> :a import <nixpkgs> {}
nix-repl> lib.range 0 10
[ 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ]
