As an optimisation for LocalStore, we read all the store directory entries into
a set. Checking for membership of this set is much faster than a stat syscall.
However for LocalOverlayStore, the lower store directory is expected to contain
a vast number of entries and reading them all can take a very long time.
So instead of enumerating them all upfront, we call pathExists as needed. This
means making stat syscalls for each store path, but the upper layer is expected
to be relatively small compared to the lower store so that should be okay.
It was initially unclear to me which of these are temporary state for
the verify paths computation, and which of these are the results of that
computation to be used in the rest of the function. Now, it is clear,
and enforced.
We don't care about non-store-paths in there (things like `.links`, are,
in fact, allowed). So let's just skip them up front and be more strongly
typed.
Over the last year or so I've run into several use cases where I need to
parse and/or serialize URLs for use by `builtins.fetchTree` or
`builtins.getFlake`, largely in order to produce _lockfile-like_ files
for lang2nix frameworks or tools which use `nix` internally to drive
builds.
I've gone through the painstaking process of emulating
`nix::FlakeRef::fromAttrs` and `nix::parseFlakeRef` several times with
mixed success; but these are difficult to create and even harder to
maintain if I hope to stay aligned with changes to the real
parser/serializer.
I understand why adding new `builtins` isn't something we want to do
flagrantly. I'm recommending this addition simply because I keep
encountering use cases where I need to parse/serialize these URIs in
`nix` expressions, and I want a reliable solution.
Co-authored-by: Eelco Dolstra <edolstra@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
Will need to do subclass-specific implementations in the next commit.
This isn't because there will be multiple variations of the daemon
protocol (whew!) but because different clients pick and choose different
parts to use.
