Nix sometimes outputs a warning message like this:
```
directory /nix does not exist; creating it by running ‘?? using sudo
```
... when it really meant to output something that looked like this:
```
directory /nix does not exist; creating it by running 'mkdir -m 0755 /nix && chown gabriel /nix' using sudo
```
The reason why is due to some bizarre behavior in Bash where it will translate anything of the form `$x’` to `??`, leading to the incorrect warning message. I don't know what is the origin of this Bash behavior, but the easiest fix is to just use ASCII quotes instead of unicode quotes.
Just wasted a couple hours chasing shadows because the nix store got
corrupted and there was no indication of that anywhere.
Since an install is one-time only, might as well verify. Optimization
showed that the copied files aren't read-only; fixed that as well.
Also, use /bin/sh since there's a good chance that this script will be
run on systems without /bin/bash
The `set -e` at the top of the script causes the installation to fail to
complete if the shell profile is not writeable. Checking file existence
only is not enough.
In some cases the bash builtin command "cd" can print the variable $CWD
to stdout. This caused the install script to fail while copying files
because the source path was wrong.
Fixes#476.
The tarball can now be unpacked anywhere. The installation script
uses "sudo" to create /nix if it doesn't exist. It also fetches the
nixpkgs-unstable channel.
For several platforms we don't currently have "native" Nix packages
(e.g. Mac OS X and FreeBSD). This provides the next best thing: a
tarball containing the closure of Nix, plus a simple script
"nix-finish-install" that initialises the Nix database, registers the
paths in the closure as valid, and runs "nix-env -i /path/to/nix" to
initialise the user profile.
The tarball must be unpacked in the root directory. It creates
/nix/store/... and /usr/bin/nix-finish-install. Typical installation
is as follows:
$ cd /
$ tar xvf /path/to/nix-1.1pre1234_abcdef-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2
$ nix-finish-install
(if necessary add ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh to the shell
login scripts)
After this, /usr/bin/nix-finish-install can be deleted, if desired.
The downside to the binary tarball is that it's pretty big (~55 MiB
for x86_64-linux).
