E.g.
$ nix upgrade-nix
error: directory '/home/eelco/Dev/nix/inst/bin' does not appear to be part of a Nix profile
instead of
$ nix upgrade-nix
error: '/home/eelco/Dev/nix/inst' is not a symlink
Fix a 32-bit overflow that resulted in negative numbers being printed;
use fmt() instead of boost::format(); change -H to -h for consistency
with 'ls' and 'du'; make the columns narrower (since they can't be
bigger than 1024.0).
If the user has an object greater than 1024 yottabytes, it'll just display it as
N yottabytes instead of overflowing.
Swaps to use boost::format strings instead of std::setw and std::setprecision.
Using a 64bit integer on 32bit systems will come with a bit of a
performance overhead, but given that Nix doesn't use a lot of integers
compared to other types, I think the overhead is negligible also
considering that 32bit systems are in decline.
The biggest advantage however is that when we use a consistent integer
size across all platforms it's less likely that we miss things that we
break due to that. One example would be:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44233
On Hydra it will evaluate, because the evaluator runs on a 64bit
machine, but when evaluating the same on a 32bit machine it will fail,
so using 64bit integers should make that consistent.
While the change of the type in value.hh is rather easy to do, we have a
few more options available for doing the conversion in the lexer:
* Via an #ifdef on the architecture and using strtol() or strtoll()
accordingly depending on which architecture we are. For the #ifdef
we would need another AX_COMPILE_CHECK_SIZEOF in configure.ac.
* Using istringstream, which would involve copying the value.
* As we're already using boost, lexical_cast might be a good idea.
Spoiler: I went for the latter, first of all because lexical_cast does
have an overload for const char* and second of all, because it doesn't
involve copying around the input string. Also, because istringstream
seems to come with a bigger overhead than boost::lexical_cast:
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/release/doc/html/boost_lexical_cast/performance.html
The first method (still using strtol/strtoll) also wasn't something I
pursued further, because it is also locale-aware which I doubt is what
we want, given that the regex for int is [0-9]+.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
Fixes: #2339
The profile present in PATH is not necessarily the actual profile
location. User profiles are generally added as $HOME/.nix-profile
in which case the indirect profile link needs to be resolved first.
/home/user/.nix-profile -> /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/user/profile
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/user/profile -> profile-15-link
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/user/profile-14-link -> /nix/store/hyi4kkjh3bwi2z3wfljrkfymz9904h62-user-environment
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/user/profile-15-link -> /nix/store/6njpl3qvihz46vj911pwx7hfcvwhifl9-user-environment
To upgrade nix here we want /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/user/profile-16-link
instead of /home/user/.nix-profile-1-link. The latter is not a gcroot
and would be garbage collected, resulting in a broken profile.
Fixes#2175
The current usage technically works by putting multiple different
repos in to the same git directory. However, it is very slow as
Git tries very hard to find common commits between the two
repositories. If the two repositories are large (like Nixpkgs and
another long-running project,) it is maddeningly slow.
This change busts the cache for existing deployments, but users
will be promptly repaid in per-repository performance.
TransferManager allocates a lot of memory (50 MiB by default), and it
might leak but I'm not sure about that. In any case it was causing
OOMs in hydra-queue-runner. So allocate only one TransferManager per
S3BinaryCacheStore.
Hopefully fixes https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/586.
This callback is executed on a different thread, so exceptions thrown
from the callback are not caught:
Aug 08 16:25:48 chef hydra-queue-runner[11967]: terminate called after throwing an instance of 'nix::Error'
Aug 08 16:25:48 chef hydra-queue-runner[11967]: what(): AWS error: failed to upload 's3://nix-cache/19dbddlfb0vp68g68y19p9fswrgl0bg7.ls'
Therefore, just check the transfer status after it completes. Also
include the S3 error message in the exception.
This didn't work anymore since decompression was only done in the
non-coroutine case.
Decompressors are now sinks, just like compressors.
Also fixed a bug in bzip2 API handling (we have to handle BZ_RUN_OK
rather than BZ_OK), which we didn't notice because there was a missing
'throw':
if (ret != BZ_OK)
CompressionError("error while compressing bzip2 file");
It adds a new operation, cmdAddToStoreNar, that does the same thing as
the corresponding nix-daemon operation, i.e. call addToStore(). This
replaces cmdImportPaths, which has the major issue that it sends the
NAR first and the store path second, thus requiring us to store the
incoming NAR either in memory or on disk until we decide what to do
with it.
For example, this reduces the memory usage of
$ nix copy --to 'ssh://localhost?remote-store=/tmp/nix' /nix/store/95cwv4q54dc6giaqv6q6p4r02ia2km35-blender-2.79
from 267 MiB to 12 MiB.
Probably fixes#1988.
In EvalState::checkSourcePath, the path is checked against the list of
allowed paths first and later it's checked again *after* resolving
symlinks.
The resolving of the symlinks is done via canonPath, which also strips
out "../" and "./". However after the canonicalisation the error message
pointing out that the path is not allowed prints the symlink target in
the error message.
Even if we'd suppress the message, symlink targets could still be leaked
if the symlink target doesn't exist (in this case the error is thrown in
canonPath).
So instead, we now do canonPath() without symlink resolving first before
even checking against the list of allowed paths and then later do the
symlink resolving and checking the allowed paths again.
The first call to canonPath() should get rid of all the "../" and "./",
so in theory the only way to leak a symlink if the attacker is able to
put a symlink in one of the paths allowed by restricted evaluation mode.
For the latter I don't think this is part of the threat model, because
if the attacker can write to that path, the attack vector is even
larger.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
This particular `shell` variable wasn't used, since a new one was
declared in the only side of the `if` branch that used a `shell`
variable.
It could realistically confuse developers thinking it could use `$SHELL`
under some situations.
forceValue() were called after a value is copied effectively forcing only one of the copies keeping another copy not evaluated.
This resulted in its evaluation of the same lazy value more than once (the number of hits is not big though)
Not ready for this yet, causes the prompt to disappear in nix repl
and more generally can overwrite non-progress-bar messages.
This reverts commit 44de71a396.
Before:
$ command time nix-prefetch-url https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/linux-4.17.6.tar.xz
1.19user 1.02system 0:41.96elapsed 5%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 182720maxresident)k
After:
1.38user 1.05system 0:39.73elapsed 6%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 16204maxresident)k
Note however that addToStore() can still take a lot of memory
(e.g. RemoteStore::addToStore() is constant space, but
LocalStore::addToStore() isn't; that's fixed by
c94b4fc7ee
though).
Fixes#1400.
For example, this allows you to do run nix-daemon as a non-privileged
user:
eelco$ NIX_STATE_DIR=~/my-nix/nix/var nix-daemon --store ~/my-nix/
The NIX_STATE_DIR is still needed because settings.nixDaemonSocketFile
is not derived from settings.storeUri (and we can't derive it from the
store's state directory because we don't want to open the store in the
parent process).
As proposed in #1634 the `nix search` command could use some
improvements. Initially 0413aeb35d added
some basic sorting behavior using `std::map`, a next step would be an
improvement of the output.
This patch includes the following changes:
* Use `$PAGER` for outputs with `RunPager` from `shared.hh`:
The same behavior is defined for `nix-env --query`, furthermore it
makes searching huge results way easier.
* Simplified result blocks:
The new output is heavily inspired by the output from `nox`, the first
line shows the attribute path and the derivaiton name
(`attribute path (derivation name)`) and the description in the second
line.
Slightly nicer behavior when updates are somewhat far apart
(during a long linking step, perhaps) ensuring things
don't appear unresponsive.
If we wait the maximum amount for the update,
don't bother waiting another 50ms (for rate-limiting purposes)
and just check if we should quit.
This also ensures we'll notice the request to quit within 1s
if quit is signalled but there is not an udpate.
(I'm not sure if this happens or not)
I hate to make this such a large check but the lack of documentation means we really have no idea what's allowed. All of them reported so far have been within ".app/Contents" directories. That appears to be a safe starting point. However, I would not be surprised to also find more paths that are disallowed for instance in .framework or .bundle directories.
Fixes#2031Fixes#2229
This makes 'nix copy' and 'nix path-info' work on .drv store
paths. Removing special treatment of .drv files seems the most
future-proof approach given the possible removal of .drv files in the
future.
Note that 'nix build' will still build (rather than substitute) .drv
paths due to the unfortunate overloading in Store::buildPaths().
EvalState contains a few counters (e.g. nrValues) that increase
quickly enough that they end up being interpreted as pointers by the
garbage collector. Moving it to the heap makes them invisible to the
garbage collector.
This reduces the max RSS doing 100 evaluations of
nixos.tests.firefox.x86_64-linux.drvPath from 455 MiB to 292 MiB.
Note: ideally, allocations would be much further up in the 64-bit
address space to reduce the odds of an integer being misinterpreted as
a pointer. Maybe we can use some linker magic to move the .bss segment
to a higher address.
This reduces the risk of object liveness misdetection. For example,
Glibc has an internal variable "mp_" that often points to a Boehm
object, keeping it alive unnecessarily. Since we don't store any
actual roots in global variables, we can just disable data segment
scanning.
With this, the max RSS doing 100 evaluations of
nixos.tests.firefox.x86_64-linux.drvPath went from 718 MiB to 455 MiB.
If a process disappears between the time /proc/[pid]/maps is opened and
the time it is read, the read() syscall will return ESRCH. This should be ignored.
In some versions/configurations libcurl doesn't handle timeouts
(especially DNS timeouts) in a way that wakes curl_multi_wait.
This doesn't appear to be a problem if using c-ares, FWIW.
This reduces memory consumption of
nix copy --from file://... --to ~/my-nix /nix/store/95cwv4q54dc6giaqv6q6p4r02ia2km35-blender-2.79
from 514 MiB to 18 MiB for an uncompressed binary cache, and from 192
MiB to 53 MiB for a bzipped binary cache. It may also be faster
because fetching can happen concurrently with decompression/writing.
Continuation of 48662d151b.
Issue https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1681.
Allow global config settings to be defined in multiple Config
classes. For example, this means that libutil can have settings and
evaluator settings can be moved out of libstore. The Config classes
are registered in a new GlobalConfig class to which config files
etc. are applied.
Relevant to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2009 in that it
removes the need for ad hoc handling of useCaseHack, which was the
underlying cause of that issue.
Continuation of 97002b684c. This makes
the daemon use constant memory. For example, it reduces the daemon's
maximum RSS on
$ nix copy --from ~/my-nix --to daemon /nix/store/1n7x0yv8vq6zi90hfmian84vdhd04bgp-blender-2.79a
from 264 MiB to 7 MiB.
We now use a TunnelSource to prevent the connection from ending up in
an undefined state if an exception is thrown while the NAR is being
sent.
Issue https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1681.
If the Env denotes a 'with', then values[0] may be an Expr* cast to a
Value*. For code that generically traverses Values/Envs, it's useful
to know this.
E.g. this makes
nix eval --restrict-eval -I /nix/store/foo '(builtins.readFile "/nix/store/foo/symlink/bla")'
(where /nix/store/foo/symlink is a symlink to another path in the
closure of /nix/store/foo) succeed.
This fixes a regression in Hydra compared to Nix 1.x (where there were
no restrictions at all on access to the Nix store).
The existing ordering linked `libutil` before `libstore`, which causes
link failures when building statically. This is due to `libstore` using
functions from `libutil`, and the fact that symbol resolution works
"forward" - i.e. if you pass `-lfoo -lbar -lbaz`, any symbols that
`libbar` uses from `libbaz` will be resolved, but symbols from `libfoo`
will not since it comes first in the command line.
All this to say: this commit reorders the libraries which fixes the link
errors.
Don't bind-mount these to themselves,
mount them into the chroot directory.
Fixes pty issues when using sandbox on CentOS 7.4.
(build of perlPackages.IOTty fails before this change)
The common use case is to search for packages containing multiple words
like a "git" "frontend". Having only one expressions makes this simple regular
use case very complicated. Instead, search accepts multiple regular epressions
which all need to match.
nix search git 'gui|frontend'
returns a list of all git uis for example
Fixes
error: getting status of '/nix/store/j8p0vv89k1pf0cn7kmfsdcs7bshwga1i-firefox-52.7.2esr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/firefox.png': No such file or directory
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1934
Also improve error message on directory/non-directory collisions.
For instance, this reduced the memory consumption of
$ nix copy --from ssh://localhost --to ~/my-nix /nix/store/1n7x0yv8vq6zi90hfmian84vdhd04bgp-blender-2.79a
from 632 MiB to 16 MiB.
From exec(3):
> The list of arguments must be terminated by a null pointer, and, since these
> are variadic functions, this pointer must be cast (char *) NULL
E.g.
cannot build on 'ssh://mac1': cannot connect to 'mac1': bash: nix-store: command not found
cannot build on 'ssh://mac2': cannot connect to 'mac2': Host key verification failed.
cannot build on 'ssh://mac3': cannot connect to 'mac3': Received disconnect from 213... port 6001:2: Too many authentication failures
Authentication failed.
copyStorePath() now pipes the output of srcStore->narFromPath()
directly into dstStore->addToStore(). The sink used by the former is
converted into a source usable by the latter using
boost::coroutine2. This is based on [1].
This reduces the maximum resident size of
$ nix build --store ~/my-nix/ /nix/store/b0zlxla7dmy1iwc3g459rjznx59797xy-binutils-2.28.1 --substituters file:///tmp/binary-cache-xz/ --no-require-sigs
from 418592 KiB to 53416 KiB. (The previous commit also reduced the
runtime from ~4.2s to ~3.4s, not sure why.) A further improvement will
be to download files into a Sink.
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nix/compare/master...Mathnerd314:dump-fix-coroutine#diff-dcbcac55a634031f9cc73707da6e4b18
Issue #1969.
It was holding on to a Value* (i.e. a std::shared_ptr<ValidPathInfo>*)
outside of the pathInfoCache lock, so the std::shared_ptr could be
destroyed between the release of the lock and the decrement of the
std::shared_ptr refcount. This can happen if more than
'path-info-cache-size' paths are added in the meantime, *or* if
clearPathInfoCache() is called. The hydra-queue-runner queue monitor
thread periodically calls the later, so is likely to trigger a crash.
Fixes https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/542.
Doing so prevents emacs tags from working, as well as makes the code extremely
confusing for a newbie.
In the prior state, if someone wants to find the definition of "ExprApp" for
example, a grep through the code reveals nothing. Since the definition could be
hiding in numerous ".h" files, it's really difficult to find. This personally
took me several hours to figure out.
This can be iterated on and currently leaves out settings we know we
want to forward, but it fixes#1713 and fixes#1935 and isn't
fundamentally broken like the status quo. Future changes are suggested
in a comment.
Flex's regexes have an annoying feature: the dot matches everything
except a newline. This causes problems for expressions like:
"${0}\
"
where the backslash-newline combination matches this rule instead of the
intended one mentioned in the comment:
<STRING>\$|\\|\$\\ {
/* This can only occur when we reach EOF, otherwise the above
(...|\$[^\{\"\\]|\\.|\$\\.)+ would have triggered.
This is technically invalid, but we leave the problem to the
parser who fails with exact location. */
return STR;
}
However, the parser actually accepts the resulting token sequence
('"' DOLLAR_CURLY 0 '}' STR '"'), which is a problem because the lexer
rule didn't assign anything to yylval. Ultimately this leads to a crash
when dereferencing a NULL pointer in ExprConcatStrings::bindVars().
The fix does change the syntax of the language in some corner cases
but I think it's only turning previously invalid (or crashing) syntax
to valid syntax. E.g.
"a\
b"
and
''a''\
b''
were previously syntax errors but now both result in "a\nb".
Found by afl-fuzz.
This allows building armv[67]l-linux derivations on compatible aarch64
machines. Failure to add the architecture may result from missing
hardware support, in which case we can't run 32-bit binaries and don't
need to restrict them with seccomp anyway,
This allows specifying additional systems that a machine is able to
build for. This may apply on some armv7-capable aarch64 processors, or
on systems using qemu-user with binfmt-misc to support transparent
execution of foreign-arch programs.
This removes the previous hard-coded assumptions about which systems are
ABI-compatible with which other systems, and instead relies on the user
to specify any additional platforms that they have ensured compatibility
for and wish to build for locally.
NixOS should probably add i686-linux on x86_64-linux systems for this
setting by default.
Otherwise, running e.g.
nix-instantiate --eval -E --strict 'builtins.replaceStrings [""] ["X"] "abc"'
would just hang in an infinite loop.
Found by afl-fuzz.
First attempt of this was reverted in e2d71bd186 because it caused
another infinite loop, which is fixed now and a test added.
This is important since this is given as an example.
Other patterns containing "empty search string" will still
be handled differently on different platforms ("asdf|")
but that's less of an issue.
The overhead of sandbox builds is a problem on NixOS (since building a
NixOS configuration involves a lot of small derivations) but not for
typical non-NixOS use cases. So outside of NixOS we can enable it.
Issue #179.
The assertion is broken because there is no one-to-one mapping from
length of a base64 string to the length of the output.
E.g.
"1q69lz7Empb06nzfkj651413n9icx0njmyr3xzq1j9q=" results in a 32-byte output.
"1q69lz7Empb06nzfkj651413n9icx0njmyr3xzq1j9qy" results in a 33-byte output.
To reproduce, evaluate:
builtins.derivationStrict {
name = "0";
builder = "0";
system = "0";
outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
outputHash = "1q69lz7Empb06nzfkj651413n9icx0njmyr3xzq1j9qy";
}
Found by afl-fuzz.
Otherwise, running e.g.
nix-instantiate --eval -E --strict 'builtins.replaceStrings [""] ["X"] "abc"'
would just hang in an infinite loop.
Found by afl-fuzz.
Instead of having lexicographicOrder() create a temporary sorted array
of Attr*:s and copying attr names from that, copy the attr names
first and then sort that.
Previously, this would fail at startup for non-NixOS installs:
nix-env --help
The fix for this is to just use "nixManDir" as the value for MANPATH
when spawning "man".
To test this, I’m using the following:
$ nix-build release.nix -A build
$ MANPATH= ./result/bin/nix-env --help
Fixes#1627
nix-store --export, nix-store --dump, and nix dump-path would previously
fail silently if writing the data out failed, because
a) FdSink::write ignored exceptions, and
b) the commands relied on FdSink's destructor, which ignores
exceptions, to flush the data out.
This could cause rather opaque issues with installing nixos, because
nix-store --export would happily proceed even if it couldn't write its
data out (e.g. if nix-store --import on the other side of the pipe
failed).
This commit adds tests that expose these issues in the nix-store
commands, and fixes them for all three.
This was caused by derivations with 'allowSubstitutes = false'. Such
derivations will be built locally. However, if there is another
SubstitionGoal that has the output of the first derivation in its
closure, then the path will be simultaneously built and substituted.
There was a check to catch this situation (via pathIsLockedByMe()),
but it no longer worked reliably because substitutions are now done in
another thread. (Thus the comment 'It can't happen between here and
the lockPaths() call below because we're not allowing multi-threading'
was no longer valid.)
The fix is to handle the path already being locked in both
SubstitutionGoal and DerivationGoal.
All ANSI sequences except color setting are now filtered out. In
particular, terminal resets (such as from NixOS VM tests) are filtered
out.
Also, fix the completely broken tab character handling.
builtins.path allows specifying the name of a path (which makes paths
with store-illegal names now addable), allows adding paths with flat
instead of recursive hashes, allows specifying a filter (so is a
generalization of filterSource), and allows specifying an expected
hash (enabling safe path adding in pure mode).
the case of hydra where the overhead of single threaded encoding is more
noticeable e.g most of the time spent in "Sending inputs"/"Receiving outputs"
is due to compression while the actual upload to the binary cache seems
to be negligible.
This is needed by nixos-install, which uses the Nix store on the
installation CD as a substituter. We don't want to disable signature
checking entirely because substitutes from cache.nixos.org should
still be checked. So now we can pas "local?trusted=1" to mark only the
Nix store in /nix as not requiring signatures.
Fixes#1819.
Instead, if a fixed-output derivation produces has an incorrect output
hash, we now unconditionally move the outputs to the path
corresponding with the actual hash and register it as valid. Thus,
after correcting the hash in the Nix expression (e.g. in a fetchurl
call), the fixed-output derivation doesn't have to be built again.
It would still be good to have a command for reporting the actual hash
of a fixed-output derivation (instead of throwing an error), but
"nix-build --hash" didn't do that.
Following discussion with Shea and Graham. It's a big enough change
from the last release. Also, from a semver perspective, 2.0 makes more
sense because we did remove some interfaces (like nix-pull/nix-push).
Some servers, such as Artifactory, allow uploading with PUT and BASIC
auth. This allows nix copy to work to upload binaries to those
servers.
Worked on together with @adelbertc
In this mode, the following restrictions apply:
* The builtins currentTime, currentSystem and storePath throw an
error.
* $NIX_PATH and -I are ignored.
* fetchGit and fetchMercurial require a revision hash.
* fetchurl and fetchTarball require a sha256 attribute.
* No file system access is allowed outside of the paths returned by
fetch{Git,Mercurial,url,Tarball}. Thus 'nix build -f ./foo.nix' is
not allowed.
Thus, the evaluation result is completely reproducible from the
command line arguments. E.g.
nix build --pure-eval '(
let
nix = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; rev = "9c927de4b179a6dd210dd88d34bda8af4b575680"; };
nixpkgs = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; ref = "release-17.09"; rev = "66b4de79e3841530e6d9c6baf98702aa1f7124e4"; };
in (import (nix + "/release.nix") { inherit nix nixpkgs; }).build.x86_64-linux
)'
The goal is to enable completely reproducible and traceable
evaluation. For example, a NixOS configuration could be fully
described by a single Git commit hash. 'nixos-rebuild' would do
something like
nix build --pure-eval '(
(import (fetchGit { url = file:///my-nixos-config; rev = "..."; })).system
')
where the Git repository /my-nixos-config would use further fetchGit
calls or Git externals to fetch Nixpkgs and whatever other
dependencies it has. Either way, the commit hash would uniquely
identify the NixOS configuration and allow it to reproduced.
* Look for both 'brotli' and 'bro' as external command,
since upstream has renamed it in newer versions.
If neither are found, current runtime behavior
is preserved: try to find 'bro' on PATH.
* Limit amount handed to BrotliEncoderCompressStream
to ensure interrupts are processed in a timely manner.
Testing shows negligible performance impact.
(Other compression sinks don't seem to require this)
E.g.
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nars \
/nix/store/b0w2hafndl09h64fhb86kw6bmhbmnpm1-blender-2.79/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/blender.svg > /dev/null
real 0m4.139s
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nars \
/nix/store/b0w2hafndl09h64fhb86kw6bmhbmnpm1-blender-2.79/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/blender.svg > /dev/null
real 0m0.024s
(Before, the second call took ~0.220s.)
This will use a NAR listing in
/tmp/nars/b0w2hafndl09h64fhb86kw6bmhbmnpm1.ls containing all metadata,
including the offsets of regular files inside the NAR. Thus, we don't
need to read the entire NAR. (We do read the entire listing, but
that's generally pretty small. We could use a SQLite DB by borrowing
some more code from nixos-channel-scripts/file-cache.hh.)
This is primarily useful when Hydra is serving files from an S3 binary
cache, in particular when you have giant NARs. E.g. we had some 12 GiB
NARs, so accessing individuals files was pretty slow.
propagated-user-env-packages files in nixpkgs aren't all terminated by
newlines, as buildenv expected. Now it does not require a terminating
newline; note that this introduces a behaviour change: propagated user
env packages may now be spread across multiple lines. However, nix
1.11.x still expects them to be on a single line so this shouldn't be
used in nixpkgs for now.
The storeUri variable in the build-remote hook is declared very much to
the start of the main function and a bunch of lines later, the same
variable gets checked via hasPrefix() but it gets assigned *after* that
check when the most suitable machine for the build was choosen.
So I guess this was just a typo in d16fd24973
and what we really want is to either checkd the prefix *after* assigning
storeUri or use bestMachine->storeUri directly.
I choose the latter, because the former could introduce even more
regressions if the try block where the variable gets assigned terminates
early.
Nevertheless, the reason why the log output didn't work is because
hasPrefix() checked for "ssh://" in front of storeUri, but if the
storeUri isn't set correctly (or at all), we don't get the log file
descriptor set up properly, leading to no log output.
I've adjusted the remote-builds test to include a regression test for
this, so that we can make sure we get a build output when using remote
builds.
In addition to that I've tested this with two of my build farms and the
build logs are emitted correctly again.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
The name had become a misnomer since it's not only for substitution
from binary caches, but when adding/copying any
(non-content-addressed) path to a store.
This allows specifying the AWS configuration profile to use. E.g.
nix copy --from s3://my-cache?profile=aws-dev-account /nix/store/cf3isrlqavvd5w7rpky1fa8j9lcnlggm-...
As far as we're concerned, not being able to access a file just means
the file is missing. Plus, AWS explicitly goes out of its way to
return a 403 if the file is missing and the requester doesn't have
permission to list the bucket.
Also getting rid of an old hack that Eelco said was only relevant
to an older AWS SDK.
For example, you can write
src = fetchgit ./.;
and if ./. refers to an unclean working tree, that tree will be copied
to the Nix store. This removes the need for "cleanSource".
This will allow bind and connect to 127.0.0.1, which can reduce purity/
security (if you're running a vulnerable service on localhost) but is
also needed for a ton of test suites, so I'm leaving it turned off by
default but allowing certain derivations to turn it on as needed.
It also allows DNS resolution of arbitrary hostnames but I haven't found
a way to avoid that. In principle I'd just want to allow resolving
localhost but that doesn't seem to be possible.
I don't think this belongs under `build-use-sandbox = relaxed` because we
want it on Hydra and I don't think it's the end of the world.
Used to determine symlink size with stat and value with readlink.
This could technically result in garbage if symlink changed between
calls. Also gets around the broken stat implementation in our
network filesystem (returns size + 1 giving a byte of garbage).
The computation of urlHash didn't take the name into account, so
subsequent fetchurl calls with the same URL but a different name would
resolve to the same cached store path.
The "name" attribute defaults to "source", which we should use for all
similar functions (e.g. fetchTarball and in Hydra) to ensure that we
get a consistent store path regardless of how the tree is fetched.
"source" is not necessarily a correct label, but using an empty name
is problematic: you get an ugly store path ending in a dash, and it's
impossible to have a fixed-output derivation that produces that path
because ".drv" is not a valid store name.
Fixes#904.
You can now include files via the "builders" option, using the syntax
"@<filename>". Having only one option makes it easier to override
builders completely.
For backward compatibility, the default is "@/etc/nix/machines", or
"@<filename>" for each file name in NIX_REMOTE_SYSTEMS.
This makes it slightly more manageable to see at a glance what in a
build's sandbox profile is unique to the build and what is standard. Also
a first step to factoring more of our Darwin logic into scheme functions
that will allow us a bit more flexibility. And of course less of that
nasty codegen in C++! 😀
This speeds up commands like "nix cat-store". For example:
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nar-cache /nix/store/i60yncmq6w9dyv37zd2k454g0fkl3arl-systemd-234/etc/udev/udev.conf
real 0m4.336s
$ time nix cat-store --store https://cache.nixos.org?local-nar-cache=/tmp/nar-cache /nix/store/i60yncmq6w9dyv37zd2k454g0fkl3arl-systemd-234/etc/udev/udev.conf
real 0m0.045s
The primary motivation is to allow hydra-server to serve files from S3
binary caches. Previously Hydra had a hack to do "nix-store -r
<path>", but that fetches the entire closure so is prohibitively
expensive.
There is no garbage collection of the NAR cache yet. Also, the entire
NAR is read when accessing a single member file. We could generate the
NAR listing to provide random access.
Note: the NAR cache is indexed by the store path hash, not the content
hash, so NAR caches should not be shared between binary caches, unless
you're sure that all your builds are binary-reproducible.
Probably as a result of a bad merge in
4b8f1b0ec0, we had both a
BinaryCacheStoreAccessor and a
RemoteFSAccessor. BinaryCacheStore::getFSAccessor() returned the
latter, but BinaryCacheStore::addToStore() checked for the
former. This probably caused hydra-queue-runner to download paths that
it just uploaded.
This check spuriously fails for e.g. git@github.com:NixOS/nixpkgs.git,
and even for ssh://git@github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git, and is made
redundant by the checks git itself will do when fetching the repo. We
instead pass a -- before passing the URI to git to avoid injection.
I needed this to test ACL/xattr removal in
canonicalisePathMetaData(). Might also be useful if you need to build
old Nixpkgs that doesn't have the required patches to remove
setuid/setgid creation.
The worker threads could exit prematurely if they finished processing
all items while the main thread was still adding items. In particular,
this caused hanging nix-store --serve processes in the build farm.
Also, process items from the main thread.
It was getting too much like whac-a-mole listing all the retriable error
conditions, so we now retry by default and list the cases where retrying
is almost certainly hopeless.
I find the error message 'nix-env --set-flag priority NUMBER PKGNAME'
not as helpful as it could be :
- doesn't share the current priorities
- doesn't say that the command must be run on the already installed
PKGNAME (which is confusing the first time)
- the doc needs careful reading:
"If there are multiple derivations matching a name in args that have the same name (e.g., gcc-3.3.6 and gcc-4.1.1), then the derivation with the highest priority is used."
if one stops reading there, he is screwed. Salvation comes with reading "A derivation can define a priority by declaring the meta.priority attribute. This attribute should be a number, with a higher value denoting a lower priority. The default priority is 0."
To sum it up, lower number wins. I tried to convey this idea in the
message too.
This is a hack to make hydra-queue-runner free its temproots
periodically, thereby ensuring that garbage collection of the
corresponding paths is not blocked until the queue runner is
restarted.
It would be better if temproots could be released earlier than at
process exit. I started working on a RAII object returned by functions
like addToStore() that releases temproots. However, this would be a
pretty massive change so I gave up on it for now.
For example,
$ nix-store -q --roots /nix/store/7phd2sav7068nivgvmj2vpm3v47fd27l-patchelf-0.8pre845_0315148
{temp:1}
denotes that the path is only being kept alive by a temporary root
(i.e. /nix/var/nix/temproots/). Similarly,
$ nix-store --gc --print-roots
...
{memory:9} -> /nix/store/094gpjn9f15ip17wzxhma4r51nvsj17p-curl-7.53.1
shows that curl is being used by some process.
This command shows why a package has another package in its runtime
closure. For example, to see why VLC has libdrm.dev in its closure:
$ nix why-depends nixpkgs.vlc nixpkgs.libdrm.dev
/nix/store/g901z9pcj0n5yy5n6ykxk3qm4ina1d6z-vlc-2.2.5.1:
lib/libvlccore.so.8.0.0: …nfig:/nix/store/405lmx6jl8lp0ad1vrr6j498chrqhz8g-libdrm-2.4.75-d…
/nix/store/s3nm7kd8hlcg0facn2q1ff2n7wrwdi2l-mesa-noglu-17.0.7-dev:
nix-support/propagated-native-build-inputs: …-dev /nix/store/405lmx6jl8lp0ad1vrr6j498chrqhz8g-libdrm-2.4.75-d…
Thus, VLC's lib/libvlccore.so.8.0.0 as well as mesa-noglu's
nix-support/propagated-native-build-inputs cause the dependency.
In particular, process() won't return as long as there are active
items. This prevents work item lambdas from referring to stack frames
that no longer exist.
Since we may use a dedicated file descriptor in the future, this
allows us to change it. So builders can do
if [[ -n $NIX_LOG_FD ]]; then
echo "@nix { message... }" >&$NIX_LOG_FD
fi
Nix can now automatically run the garbage collector during builds or
while adding paths to the store. The option "min-free = <bytes>"
specifies that Nix should run the garbage collector whenever free
space in the Nix store drops below <bytes>. It will then delete
garbage until "max-free" bytes are available.
Garbage collection during builds is asynchronous; running builds are
not paused and new builds are not blocked. However, there also is a
synchronous GC run prior to the first build/substitution.
Currently, no old GC roots are deleted (as in "nix-collect-garbage
-d").
Since file locks are per-process rather than per-file-descriptor, the
garbage collector would always acquire a lock on its own temproots
file and conclude that it's stale.
Without this, substitute info is fetched sequentially, which is
superslow. In the old UI (e.g. nix-build), we call printMissing(),
which calls queryMissing(), thereby preheating the binary cache
cache. But the new UI doesn't do that.
In particular, drop the "build-" and "gc-" prefixes which are
pointless. So now you can say
nix build --no-sandbox
instead of
nix build --no-build-use-sandbox
This is useful for testing commands in isolation.
For example,
$ nix run nixpkgs.geeqie -i -k DISPLAY -k XAUTHORITY -c geeqie
runs geeqie in an empty environment, except for $DISPLAY and
$XAUTHORITY.
E.g.
nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello --greeting Hallo
Note that unlike "nix-shell --command", no quoting of arguments is
necessary.
"-c" (short for "--command") cannot be combined with "--" because they
both consume all remaining arguments. But since installables shouldn't
start with a dash, this is unlikely to cause problems.
Running "nix run" with a diverted store, e.g.
$ nix run --store local?root=/tmp/nix nixpkgs.hello
stopped working when Nix became multithreaded, because
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) doesn't work in multithreaded processes. The
obvious solution is to terminate all other threads first, but 1) there
is no way to terminate Boehm GC marker threads; and 2) it appears that
the kernel has a race where unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER) will still fail for
some indeterminate amount of time after joining other threads.
So instead, "nix run" will now exec() a single-threaded helper ("nix
__run_in_chroot") that performs the actual unshare()/chroot()/exec().
Now that we use threads in lots of places, it's possible for
TunnelLogger::log() to be called asynchronously from other threads
than the main loop. So we need to ensure that STDERR_NEXT messages
don't clobber other messages.
Besides being unused, this function has a bug that it will incorrectly
decode the path component Ubuntu\04016.04.2\040LTS\040amd64 as
"Ubuntu.04.2 LTS amd64" instead of "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS amd64".
This adds an argument "rev" specififying the Git commit hash. The
existing argument "rev" is renamed to "ref". The default value for
"ref" is "master". When specifying a hash, it's necessary to specify a
ref since we're not cloning the entire repository but only fetching a
specific ref.
Example usage:
builtins.fetchgit {
url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git;
ref = "release-16.03";
rev = "c1c0484041ab6f9c6858c8ade80a8477c9ae4442";
};
The package list is now cached in
~/.cache/nix/package-search.json. This gives a substantial speedup to
"nix search" queries. For example (on an SSD):
First run: (no package search cache, cold page cache)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m6.516s
Second run: (package search cache populated)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m0.143s
In particular, don't use base-64, which we don't support. (We do have
base-32 redirects for hysterical reasons.)
Also, add a test for the hashed mirror feature.
This doesn't work in read-only mode, ensuring that operations like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org -S nixpkgs.hello
(asking for the closure size of nixpkgs.hello in cache.nixos.org) work
when nixpkgs.hello doesn't exist in the local store.
On second though this was annoying. E.g. "nix log nixpkgs.hello" would
build/download Hello first, even though the log can be fetched
directly from the binary cache.
May need to revisit this.
This allows builds to call setuid binaries. This was previously
possible until we started using seccomp. Turns out that seccomp by
default disallows processes from acquiring new privileges. Generally,
any use of setuid binaries (except those created by the builder
itself) is by definition impure, but some people were relying on this
ability for certain tests.
Example:
$ nix build '(with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" {} "/run/wrappers/bin/ping -c 1 8.8.8.8; exit 1")' --no-allow-new-privileges
builder for ‘/nix/store/j0nd8kv85hd6r4kxgnwzvr0k65ykf6fv-foo.drv’ failed with exit code 1; last 2 log lines:
cannot raise the capability into the Ambient set
: Operation not permitted
$ nix build '(with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" {} "/run/wrappers/bin/ping -c 1 8.8.8.8; exit 1")' --allow-new-privileges
builder for ‘/nix/store/j0nd8kv85hd6r4kxgnwzvr0k65ykf6fv-foo.drv’ failed with exit code 1; last 6 log lines:
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=15.2 ms
Fixes#1429.
Functions like copyClosure() had 3 bool arguments, which creates a
severe risk of mixing up arguments.
Also, implement copyClosure() using copyPaths().
Cygwin sqlite3 is patched to call SetDllDirectory("/usr/bin") on init, which
affects the current process and is inherited by child processes. It causes
DLLs to be loaded from /usr/bin/ before $PATH, which breaks all sorts of
things. A typical failures would be header/lib version mismatches (e.g.
openssl when running checkPhase on openssh). We'll just set it back to the
default value.
Note that this is a problem with the cygwin version of sqlite3 (currently
3.18.0). nixpkgs doesn't have the problematic patch.
There's no reason to restrict this to Error exceptions. This shouldn't
matter to #1407 since the repl doesn't catch non-Error exceptions
anyway, but you never know...
Recently aws-sdk-cpp quietly switched to using S3 virtual host URIs
(https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-cpp/commit/69d9c53882), i.e. it sends
requests to http://<bucket>.<region>.s3.amazonaws.com rather than
http://<region>.s3.amazonaws.com/<bucket>. However this interacts
badly with curl connection reuse. For example, if we do the following:
1) Check whether a bucket exists using GetBucketLocation.
2) If it doesn't, create it using CreateBucket.
3) Do operations on the bucket.
then 3) will fail for a minute or so with a NoSuchBucket exception,
presumably because the server being hit is a fallback for cases when
buckets don't exist.
Disabling the use of virtual hosts ensures that 3) succeeds
immediately. (I don't know what S3's consistency guarantees are for
bucket creation, but in practice buckets appear to be available
immediately.)
Newer versions of aws-sdk-cpp call CalculateDelayBeforeNextRetry()
even for non-retriable errors (like NoSuchKey) whih causes log spam in
hydra-queue-runner.
Sandboxes cannot be nested, so if Nix's build runs inside a sandbox,
it cannot use a sandbox itself. I don't see a clean way to detect
whether we're in a sandbox, so use a test-specific hack.
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1413
In particular, UF_IMMUTABLE (uchg) needs to be cleared to allow the
path to be garbage-collected or optimised.
See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/25819.
+ the file from being garbage-collected.
Thus, instead of ‘--option <name> <value>’, you can write ‘--<name>
<value>’. So
--option http-connections 100
becomes
--http-connections 100
Apart from brevity, the difference is that it's not an error to set a
non-existent option via --option, but unrecognized arguments are
fatal.
Boolean options have special treatment: they're mapped to the
argument-less flags ‘--<name>’ and ‘--no-<name>’. E.g.
--option auto-optimise-store false
becomes
--no-auto-optimise-store
Even with "build-use-sandbox = false", we now use sandboxing with a
permissive profile that allows everything except the creation of
setuid/setgid binaries.
Also, add rules to allow fixed-output derivations to access the
network.
These rules are sufficient to build stdenvDarwin without any
__sandboxProfile magic.
The filename used was not unique and owned by the build user, so
builds could fail with
error: while setting up the build environment: cannot unlink ‘/nix/store/99i210ihnsjacajaw8r33fmgjvzpg6nr-bison-3.0.4.drv.sb’: Permission denied
runResolver() was barfing on directories like
/System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Versions/Current/PlugIns. It
should probably do something sophisticated for frameworks, but let's
ignore them for now.
This fixes
error: getting attributes of path ‘Versions/Current/CoreFoundation’: No such file or directory
when /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/CoreFoundation is a symlink.
Also fixes a segfault when encounting a file that is not a MACH binary (such
as /dev/null, which is included in __impureHostDeps in Nixpkgs).
Possibly fixes#786.
Fixes
src/libstore/build.cc:2321:45: error: non-constant-expression cannot be narrowed from type 'int' to 'scmp_datum_t' (aka 'unsigned long') in initializer list [-Wc++11-narrowing]
EAs/ACLs are not part of the NAR canonicalisation. Worse, setting an
ACL allows a builder to create writable files in the Nix store. So get
rid of them.
Closes#185.
This prevents builders from setting the S_ISUID or S_ISGID bits,
preventing users from using a nixbld* user to create a setuid/setgid
binary to interfere with subsequent builds under the same nixbld* uid.
This is based on aszlig's seccomp code
(47f587700d).
Reported by Linus Heckemann.
Fixes
client# error: size mismatch importing path ‘/nix/store/ywf5fihjlxwijm6ygh6s0a353b5yvq4d-libidn2-0.16’; expected 0, got 120264
This is mostly an artifact of the NixOS VM test environment, where the
Nix database doesn't contain hashes/sizes.
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/53537471
And add a 116 KiB ash shell from busybox to the release build. This
helps to make sandbox builds work out of the box on non-NixOS systems
and with diverted stores.
This is useful when we're using a diverted store (e.g. "--store
local?root=/tmp/nix") in conjunction with a statically-linked sh from
the host store (e.g. "sandbox-paths =/bin/sh=/nix/store/.../bin/busybox").
Previously, if a directory `foo` existed and a file `foo-` (where `-` is any character that is sorted before `/`), then `readDirectory` would return an empty list.
To fix this, we now use a tree where we can just access the children of the node, and do not need to rely on sorting behavior to list the contents of a directory.
It now means "paths that were built locally". It no longer includes
paths that were added locally. For those we don't need info.ultimate,
since we have the content-addressability assertion (info.ca).
This is a little convenience command that opens the Nix expression of
the specified package. For example,
nix edit nixpkgs.perlPackages.Moose
opens <nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/perl-packages.nix> in $EDITOR (at the
right line number for some editors).
This requires the package to have a meta.position attribute.
There is a security issue when a build accidentally stores its $TMPDIR
in some critical place, such as an RPATH. If
TMPDIR=/tmp/nix-build-..., then any user on the system can recreate
that directory and inject libraries into the RPATH of programs
executed by other users. Since /build probably doesn't exist (or isn't
world-writable), this mitigates the issue.
Opening an SSHStore or LegacySSHStore does not actually establish a
connection, so the try/catch block here did nothing. Added a
Store::connect() method to test whether a connection can be
established.
This is useful for one-off situations where you want to specify a
builder on the command line instead of having to mess with
nix.machines. E.g.
$ nix-build -A hello --argstr system x86_64-darwin \
--option builders 'root@macstadium1 x86_64-darwin'
will perform the specified build on "macstadium1".
It also removes the need for a separate nix.machines file since you
can specify builders in nix.conf directly. (In fact nix.machines is
yet another hack that predates the general nix.conf configuration
file, IIRC.)
Note: this option is supported by the daemon for trusted users. The
fact that this allows trusted users to specify paths to SSH keys to
which they don't normally have access is maybe a bit too much trust...
For backwards compatibility, if the URI is just a hostname, ssh://
(i.e. LegacySSHStore) is prepended automatically.
Also, all fields except the URI are now optional. For example, this is
a valid nix.machines file:
local?root=/tmp/nix
This is useful for testing the remote build machinery since you don't
have to mess around with ssh.
This is to simplify remote build configuration. These environment
variables predate nix.conf.
The build hook now has a sensible default (namely build-remote).
The current load is kept in the Nix state directory now.
Since build-remote uses buildDerivation() now, we don't need to copy
the .drv file anymore. This greatly reduces the set of input paths
copied to the remote side (e.g. from 392 to 51 store paths for GNU
hello on x86_64-darwin).
This default implementation of buildPaths() does nothing if all
requested paths are already valid, and throws an "unsupported
operation" error otherwise. This fixes a regression introduced by
c30330df6f in binary cache and legacy
SSH stores.
With catch-all rules, we hide potential errors.
It turns out that a4744254 made one cath-all useless. Flex detected that
is was impossible to reach.
The other is more subtle, as it can only trigger on unfinished escapes
in unfinished strings, which only occurs at EOF.
This caused "nix-store --import" to compute an incorrect hash on NARs
that don't fit in an unsigned int. The import would succeed, but
"nix-store --verify-path" or subsequent exports would detect an
incorrect hash.
A deeper issue is that the export/import format does not contain a
hash, so we can't detect such issues early.
Also, I learned that -Wall does not warn about this.
So for instance "nix copy --to ... nixpkgs.hello" will build
nixpkgs.hello first. It's debatable whether this is a good idea. It
seems desirable for commands like "nix copy" but maybe not for
commands like "nix path-info".
Thus
$ nix build -f foo.nix
will build foo.nix.
And
$ nix build
will build default.nix. However, this may not be a good idea because
it's kind of inconsistent, given that "nix build foo" will build the
"foo" attribute from the default installation source (i.e. the
synthesis of $NIX_PATH), rather than ./default.nix. So I may revert
this.
This allows commands like 'nix path-info', 'nix copy', 'nix verify'
etc. to work on arbitrary installables. E.g. to copy geeqie to a
binary cache:
$ nix copy -r --to file:///tmp/binary-cache nixpkgs.geeqie
Or to get the closure size of thunderbird:
$ nix path-info -S nixpkgs.thunderbird
In particular, this disallows attribute names containing dots or
starting with dots. Hydra already disallowed these. This affects the
following packages in Nixpkgs master:
2048-in-terminal
2bwm
389-ds-base
90secondportraits
lispPackages.3bmd
lispPackages.hu.dwim.asdf
lispPackages.hu.dwim.def
Closes#1342.
The typical use is to inherit Config and add Setting<T> members:
class MyClass : private Config
{
Setting<int> foo{this, 123, "foo", "the number of foos to use"};
Setting<std::string> bar{this, "blabla", "bar", "the name of the bar"};
MyClass() : Config(readConfigFile("/etc/my-app.conf"))
{
std::cout << foo << "\n"; // will print 123 unless overriden
}
};
Currently, this is used by Store and its subclasses for store
parameters. You now get a warning if you specify a non-existant store
parameter in a store URI.
This provides a significant speedup, e.g. 64 s -> 12 s for
nix-build --dry-run -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-16.03 '<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
on a cold local and CloudFront cache.
The alternative is to use lots of concurrent daemon connections but
that seems wasteful.
This is useless because the client also caches path info, and can
cause problems for long-running clients like hydra-queue-runner
(i.e. it may return cached info about paths that have been
garbage-collected).
This fixes "No such file or directory" when opening /dev/ptmx
(e.g. http://hydra.nixos.org/build/51094249).
The reason appears to be some changes to /dev/ptmx / /dev/pts handling
between Linux 4.4 and 4.9. See
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/7832531/.
The fix is to go back to mounting a proper /dev/pts instance inside
the sandbox. Happily, this now works inside user namespaces, even for
unprivileged users. So
NIX_REMOTE=local?root=/tmp/nix nix-build \
'<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
works for non-root users.
The downside is that the fix breaks sandbox builds on older kernels
(probably pre-4.6), since mounting a devpts fails inside user
namespaces for some reason I've never been able to figure out. Builds
on those systems will fail with
error: while setting up the build environment: mounting /dev/pts: Invalid argument
Ah well.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.
There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:
* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching
Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.
The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).