The package list is now cached in
~/.cache/nix/package-search.json. This gives a substantial speedup to
"nix search" queries. For example (on an SSD):
First run: (no package search cache, cold page cache)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m6.516s
Second run: (package search cache populated)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m0.143s
Thus, instead of ‘--option <name> <value>’, you can write ‘--<name>
<value>’. So
--option http-connections 100
becomes
--http-connections 100
Apart from brevity, the difference is that it's not an error to set a
non-existent option via --option, but unrecognized arguments are
fatal.
Boolean options have special treatment: they're mapped to the
argument-less flags ‘--<name>’ and ‘--no-<name>’. E.g.
--option auto-optimise-store false
becomes
--no-auto-optimise-store
This caused "nix-store --import" to compute an incorrect hash on NARs
that don't fit in an unsigned int. The import would succeed, but
"nix-store --verify-path" or subsequent exports would detect an
incorrect hash.
A deeper issue is that the export/import format does not contain a
hash, so we can't detect such issues early.
Also, I learned that -Wall does not warn about this.
The typical use is to inherit Config and add Setting<T> members:
class MyClass : private Config
{
Setting<int> foo{this, 123, "foo", "the number of foos to use"};
Setting<std::string> bar{this, "blabla", "bar", "the name of the bar"};
MyClass() : Config(readConfigFile("/etc/my-app.conf"))
{
std::cout << foo << "\n"; // will print 123 unless overriden
}
};
Currently, this is used by Store and its subclasses for store
parameters. You now get a warning if you specify a non-existant store
parameter in a store URI.
This is useless because the client also caches path info, and can
cause problems for long-running clients like hydra-queue-runner
(i.e. it may return cached info about paths that have been
garbage-collected).
You can now set the store parameter "text-compression=br" to compress
textual files in the binary cache (i.e. narinfo and logs) using
Brotli. This sets the Content-Encoding header; the extension of
compressed files is unchanged.
You can separately specify the compression of log files using
"log-compression=br". This is useful when you don't want to compress
narinfo files for backward compatibility.
Build logs on cache.nixos.org are compressed using Brotli (since this
allows them to be decompressed automatically by Chrome and Firefox),
so it's handy if "nix log" can decompress them.
