They are put in the manual separate pages under the new overarching
description of experimental features.
The settings page just lists the valid experimental feature names (so
people know what a valid setting entry looks like), with links to those
pages. It doesn't attempt to describe each experimental feature as that
is too much information for the configuration settings section.
Instead of constructing a markdown list in C++ (which involved all sorts
of nasty string literals), export some JSON and assemble it with the
manual build system.
Besides following the precedent set with other dumped data, this is a
better separate of content and presentation; if we decide for example we
want to display this information in a different way, or in a different
section of the manual, it will become much easier to do so.
Adds a new boolean structured attribute
`outputChecks.<output>.unsafeDiscardReferences` which disables scanning
an output for runtime references.
__structuredAttrs = true;
outputChecks.out.unsafeDiscardReferences = true;
This is useful when creating filesystem images containing their own embedded Nix
store: they are self-contained blobs of data with no runtime dependencies.
Setting this attribute requires the experimental feature
`discard-references` to be enabled.
The new experimental feature 'cgroups' enables the use of cgroups for
all builds. This allows better containment and enables setting
resource limits and getting some build stats.
nix show-config --json was serializing experimental features as ints.
nlohmann::json will automatically use these definitions to serialize
and deserialize ExperimentalFeatures.
Strictly, we don't use the from_json instance yet, it's provided for
completeness and hopefully future use.
Impure derivations are derivations that can produce a different result
every time they're built. Example:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
name = "impure";
__impure = true; # marks this derivation as impure
outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
outputHashMode = "recursive";
buildCommand = "date > $out";
};
Some important characteristics:
* This requires the 'impure-derivations' experimental feature.
* Impure derivations are not "cached". Thus, running "nix-build" on
the example above multiple times will cause a rebuild every time.
* They are implemented similar to CA derivations, i.e. the output is
moved to a content-addressed path in the store. The difference is
that we don't register a realisation in the Nix database.
* Pure derivations are not allowed to depend on impure derivations. In
the future fixed-output derivations will be allowed to depend on
impure derivations, thus forming an "impurity barrier" in the
dependency graph.
* When sandboxing is enabled, impure derivations can access the
network in the same way as fixed-output derivations. In relaxed
sandboxing mode, they can access the local filesystem.
Rather than having them plain strings scattered through the whole
codebase, create an enum containing all the known experimental features.
This means that
- Nix can now `warn` when an unkwown experimental feature is passed
(making it much nicer to spot typos and spot deprecated features)
- It’s now easy to remove a feature altogether (once the feature isn’t
experimental anymore or is dropped) by just removing the field for the
enum and letting the compiler point us to all the now invalid usages
of it.
