A corrupt entry in .links prevents adding a fixed version of that file
to the store in any path. The user experience is that corruption
present in the store 'spreads' to new paths added to the store:
(With store optimisation enabled)
1. A file in the store gets corrupted somehow (eg: filesystem bug).
2. The user tries to add a thing to the store which contains a good copy
of the corrupted file.
3. The file being added to the store is hashed, found to match the bad
.links entry, and is replaced by a link to the bad .links entry.
(The .links entry's hash is not verified during add -- this would
impose a substantial performance burden.)
4. The user observes that the thing in the store that is supposed to be
a copy of what they were trying to add is not a correct copy -- some
files have different contents! Running "nix-store --verify
--check-contents --repair" does not fix the problem.
This change makes "nix-store --verify --check-contents --repair" fix
this problem. Bad .links entries are simply removed, allowing future
attempts to insert a good copy of the file to succeed.
This doesn't work anymore since `packages` was removed from the
`nixpkgs`-fork with flake support[1], now it's only possible to refer to
pkgs via `legacyPackages`.
[1] 49c9b71e4c
This documents the outcome of the change in
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/454:
> We can also automatically add parentheses in the generated
> `buildInputs`, so you can type `nix-shell -p "expr"`
> instead of `"(expr").
The store path is not enough. For example, when we build a dirty tree,
commit, and build the clean tree, a re-evaluation is necessary because
the flake may depend on the lastModified or revCount attributes.
Derivations that want to use recursion should now set
requiredSystemFeatures = [ "recursive-nix" ];
to make the daemon socket appear.
Also, Nix should be configured with "experimental-features =
recursive-nix".
