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 fetchers copies a plain directory (i.e. not a Git/Mercurial
repository) to the store (or does nothing if the path is already a
store path).
One use case is to pin the 'nixpkgs' flake used to build the current
NixOS system, and prevent it from being garbage-collected, via a
system registry entry like this:
{
"from": {
"id": "nixpkgs",
"type": "indirect"
},
"to": {
"type": "path",
"path": "/nix/store/rralhl3wj4rdwzjn16g7d93mibvlr521-source",
"lastModified": 1585388205,
"rev": "b0c285807d6a9f1b7562ec417c24fa1a30ecc31a"
},
"exact": true
}
Note the fake "lastModified" and "rev" attributes that ensure that the
flake gives the same evaluation results as the corresponding
Git/GitHub inputs.
An example use is for pinning the "nixpkgs" entry the system-wide
registry to a particular store path. Inexact matches
(e.g. "nixpkgs/master") should still use the global registry.
One application for this is pinning the 'nixpkgs' flake to the exact
revision used to build the NixOS system, e.g.
{
"flakes": [
{
"from": {
"id": "nixpkgs",
"type": "indirect"
},
"to": {
"owner": "NixOS",
"repo": "nixpkgs",
"type": "github",
"rev": "b0c285807d6a9f1b7562ec417c24fa1a30ecc31a"
}
}
],
"version": 2
}
