I think that it's not very helpful to get "cached failures" in a wrong
`flake.nix`. This can be very confusing when debugging a Nix expression.
See for instance NixOS/nixpkgs#118115.
In fact, the eval cache allows a forced reevaluation which is used for
e.g. `nix eval`.
This change makes sure that this is the case for `nix build` as well. So
rather than
λ ma27 [~/Projects/exp] → ../nix/outputs/out/bin/nix build -L --rebuild --experimental-features 'nix-command flakes'
error: cached failure of attribute 'defaultPackage.x86_64-linux'
the evaluation of already-evaluated (and failed) attributes looks like
this now:
λ ma27 [~/Projects/exp] → ../nix/outputs/out/bin/nix build -L --rebuild --experimental-features 'nix-command flakes'
error: attribute 'hell' missing
at /nix/store/mrnvi9ss8zn5wj6gpn4bcd68vbh42mfh-source/flake.nix:6:35:
5|
6| packages.x86_64-linux.hello = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.hell;
| ^
7|
(use '--show-trace' to show detailed location information)
Fixes#3872.
This is a bit hacky. Ideally we would automatically re-evaluate the
failed attribute iff we need to print the error message (so in
commands like 'nix search' we wouldn't re-evaluate because we're
suppressing errors).