There is a long-standing race condition when copying a closure to a
remote machine, particularly affecting build-remote.pl: the client
first asks the remote machine which paths it already has, then copies
over the missing paths. If the garbage collector kicks in on the
remote machine between the first and second step, the already-present
paths may be deleted. The missing paths may then refer to deleted
paths, causing nix-copy-closure to fail. The client now performs both
steps using a single remote Nix call (using ‘nix-store --serve’),
locking all paths in the closure while querying.
I changed the --serve protocol a bit (getting rid of QueryCommand), so
this breaks the SSH substituter from older versions. But it was marked
experimental anyway.
Fixes#141.
‘nix-store --export’.
* Add a Perl module that provides the functionality of
‘nix-copy-closure --to’. This is used by build-remote.pl so it no
longer needs to start a separate nix-copy-closure process. Also, it
uses the Perl API to do the export, so it doesn't need to start a
separate nix-store process either. As a result, nix-copy-closure
and build-remote.pl should no longer fail on very large closures due
to an "Argument list too long" error. (Note that having very many
dependencies in a single derivation can still fail because the
environment can become too large. Can't be helped though.)
