Incorrectly high expectations lead to frustration for users who
stick around to experience how useless it is for e.g. a devShell
https://functional.cafe/@arianvp/112976284363120036:
> Flakes doesn't have eval caching. It has command line argument
> caching. It literally just stores the cli argument you passed
> in a sqlite database and yes that's as useless as it sounds
> When I discovered flakes had no expression level caching whatsoever
> I kind of felt lied to and betrayed.
* add cross-references to `nix-path` overriding
while this information is already present in the settings, it's more
likely to be first accessed through the "lookup path" page, which
currently requires following two links to get to the practically
important bits.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
The test split matches PR #8920, so the utility files and tests files
are once again to 1-1. The string changes continues what was started in
PR #11093.
* docs: unify documentation on search paths
- put all the information on search path semantics into `builtins.findFile`
- put all the information on determining the value of `builtins.nixPath` into the
`nix-path` setting
maybe `builtins.nixPath` is a better place for this, but those bits
can still be moved around now that it's all next to each other.
- link to the syntax page for lookup paths from all places that are
concerned with it
- add or clarify examples
- add a test verifying a claim from documentation
This also bans various sneaking of negative numbers from the language
into unsuspecting builtins as was exposed while auditing the
consequences of changing the Nix language integer type to a newtype.
It's unlikely that this change comprehensively ensures correctness when
passing integers out of the Nix language and we should probably add a
checked-narrowing function or something similar, but that's out of scope
for the immediate change.
During the development of this I found a few fun facts about the
language:
- You could overflow integers by converting from unsigned JSON values.
- You could overflow unsigned integers by converting negative numbers
into them when going into Nix config, into fetchTree, and into flake
inputs.
The flake inputs and Nix config cannot actually be tested properly
since they both ban thunks, however, we put in checks anyway because
it's possible these could somehow be used to do such shenanigans some
other way.
Note that Lix has banned Nix language integer overflows since the very
first public beta, but threw a SIGILL about them because we run with
-fsanitize=signed-overflow -fsanitize-undefined-trap-on-error in
production builds. Since the Nix language uses signed integers, overflow
was simply undefined behaviour, and since we defined that to trap, it
did.
Trapping on it was a bad UX, but we didn't even entirely notice
that we had done this at all until it was reported as a bug a couple of
months later (which is, to be fair, that flag working as intended), and
it's got enough production time that, aside from code that is IMHO buggy
(and which is, in any case, not in nixpkgs) such as
https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix/issues/445, we don't think
anyone doing anything reasonable actually depends on wrapping overflow.
Even for weird use cases such as doing funny bit crimes, it doesn't make
sense IMO to have wrapping behaviour, since two's complement arithmetic
overflow behaviour is so *aggressively* not what you want for *any* kind
of mathematics/algorithms. The Nix language exists for package
management, a domain where bit crimes are already only dubiously in
scope to begin with, and it makes a lot more sense for that domain for
the integers to never lose precision, either by throwing errors if they
would, or by being arbitrary-precision.
Fixes: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/10968
Original-CL: https://gerrit.lix.systems/c/lix/+/1596
Change-Id: I51f253840c4af2ea5422b8a420aa5fafbf8fae75
The actual motive here is the avoidance of integer overflow if we were
to make these use checked NixInts and retain the subtraction.
However, the actual *intent* of this code is a three-way comparison,
which can be done with operator<=>, so we should just do *that* instead.
Change-Id: I7f9a7da1f3176424b528af6d1b4f1591e4ab26bf
* manual: Contributing -> Development, Hacking -> Building
what's currently called "hacking" are really instructions for setting up
a development environment and compiling from source. we have
a contribution guide in the repo (which rightly focuses on GitHub
workflows), and the material in the manual is more about working
on the code itself.
since we'd otherwise have three headings that amount to "Building Nix",
this change also moves the "classic Nix" instructions to the top.
we may want to reorganise this in the future, and bring
contributor-oriented information closer to the code, but for now let's
stick to more accurate names to ease navigation.
* fix NIX_PATH overriding
- test restricted evaluation
- test precedence for setting the search path
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <robert@roberthensing.nl>
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
This is in accordance with ARM's naming convention.
"Low" is confusing, because it could refer to either the cold end
of the stack as an abstract data type, or a low address.
These are different places, because the stack grows down through
the address space.
