dependency. `storePath /nix/store/bla' gives exactly the same
result as `toPath /nix/store/bla', except that the former includes
/nix/store/bla in the dependency context of the string.
Useful in some generated Nix expressions like nix-push, which now
finally does the right thing wrt distributed builds. (Previously
the path to be packed wasn't an explicit dependency, so it wouldn't
be copied to the remote machine.)
subtle and often hard-to-reproduce bugs where programs in pipes
either barf with a "Broken pipe" message or not, depending on the
exact timing conditions. This particularly happened in GNU M4 (and
Bison, which uses M4).
disasters involving `rm -rf' on bind mounts. Will try the
definitive fix (per-process mounts, apparently possible via the
CLONE_NEWNS flag in clone()) some other time.
accessed time of paths that may be deleted. Anything more recently
used won't be deleted. The time is specified in time_t,
e.g. seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC; use `date +%s' to
convert to time_t from the command line.
Example: to delete everything that hasn't been used in the last two
months:
$ nix-store --gc -v --max-atime $(date +%s -d "2 months ago")
order of ascending last access time. This is useful in conjunction
with --max-freed or --max-links to prefer deleting non-recently used
garbage, which is good (especially in the build farm) since garbage
may become live again.
The code could easily be modified to accept other criteria for
ordering garbage by changing the comparison operator used by the
priority queue in collectGarbage().
attributes from the meta attribute. Not doing so caused nix-env to
barf on the "psi" package, which has a meta.function attribute,
the textual serialisation of which causes a gigantic string to be
produced --- so big that it causes nix-env to run out of memory.
Note however that "meta" really only should contain strings.
meta.function should be passthru.function.
particular, dietlibc cannot figure out the cwd because the inode of
the current directory doesn't appear in .. (because getdents returns
the inode of the mount point).
(which means it can only be defined via "inherit"), otherwise we get
scoping bugs, since __overrides can't be recursive (or at least, it
would be hard).
need /etc in the chroot (in particular, /etc/resolv.conf for
fetchurl). Not having /etc/resolv.conf in the chroot is a good
thing, since we don't want normal derivations to download files.
~/.nix-defexpr, otherwise the attribute cannot be selected with the
`-A' option. Useful if you want to stick a Nix expression directly
in ~/.nix-defexpr.
a rec. This will be very useful to allow end-user customisation of
all-packages.nix, for instance globally overriding GCC or some other
dependency. The // operator doesn't cut it: you could replace the
"gcc" attribute, but all other attributes would continue to
reference the original value due to the substitution semantics of
rec.
The syntax is a bit hacky but this is to allow backwards
compatibility.
in attribute set pattern matches. This allows defining a function
that takes *at least* the listed attributes, while ignoring
additional attributes. For instance,
{stdenv, fetchurl, fuse, ...}:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
...
};
defines a function that requires an attribute set that contains the
specified attributes but ignores others. The main advantage is that
we can then write in all-packages.nix
aefs = import ../bla/aefs pkgs;
instead of
aefs = import ../bla/aefs {
inherit stdenv fetchurl fuse;
};
This saves a lot of typing (not to mention not having to update
all-packages.nix with purely mechanical changes). It saves as much
typing as the "args: with args;" style, but has the advantage that
the function arguments are properly declared (not implicit in what
the body of the "with" uses).
functions that take a single argument (plain lambdas) into one AST
node (Function) that contains a Pattern node describing the
arguments. Current patterns are single lazy arguments (VarPat) and
matching against an attribute set (AttrsPat).
This refactoring allows other kinds of patterns to be added easily,
such as Haskell-style @-patterns, or list pattern matching.
`-u'. Instead of acquiring an exclusive lock on the profile for the
entire duration of the operation, we just perform the operation
optimistically (without an exclusive lock), and check at the end
whether the profile changed while we were busy (i.e., the symlink
target changed). If so, the operation is restarted. Restarting is
generally cheap, since the build results are still in the Nix store.
Most of the time, only the user environment has to be rebuilt.
again. (After the previous substituter mechanism refactoring I
didn't update the code that obtains the references of substitutable
paths.) This required some refactoring: the substituter programs
are now kept running and receive/respond to info requests via
stdin/stdout.
it only does something if $NIX_OTHER_STORES (not really a good
name...) is set.
* Do globbing on the elements of $NIX_OTHER_STORES. E.g. you could
set it to /mnts/*/nix or something.
* Install substituters in libexec/nix/substituters.
logic through the `parseDrvName' and `compareVersions' primops.
This will allow expressions to easily check whether some dependency
is a specific needed version or falls in some version range. See
tests/lang/eval-okay-versions.nix for examples.
bytes have been freed, `--max-links' to stop when the Nix store
directory has fewer than N hard links (the latter being important
for very large Nix stores on filesystems with a 32000 subdirectories
limit).
store under the reference relation, since that means that the
garbage collector will need a long time to start deleting paths.
Instead just delete the referrers of a path first.
This isn't usually a problem, except that it causes tests to fail
when performed in a directory with a very long path name. So chdir
to the socket directory and use a relative path name.
/tmp/nix-<pid>-<counter> for temporary build directories. This
increases purity a bit: many packages store the temporary build path
in their output, causing (generally unimportant) binary differences.
undefined variables by definition. This matters for the
implementation of "with", which does a call to checkVarDefs to see
if the body of the with has no undefined variables. (It can't be
checked at parse time because you don't know which variables are in
the "with" attribute set.) If we check closed terms, then we check
not just the with body but also the substituted terms, which are
typically very large. This is the cause of the poor nix-env
performance on Nixpkgs lately. It didn't happen earlier because
"with" wasn't used very often in the past.
This fix improves nix-env performance roughly 60x on current Nixpkgs.
nix-env -qa is down from 29.3s to 0.5s on my laptop, and nix-env -qa
--out-path is down from 229s to 3.39s. Not bad for a 1-line fix :-)
single quotes. Example (from NixOS):
job = ''
start on network-interfaces
start script
rm -f /var/run/opengl-driver
${if videoDriver == "nvidia"
then "ln -sf ${nvidiaDrivers} /var/run/opengl-driver"
else if cfg.driSupport
then "ln -sf ${mesa} /var/run/opengl-driver"
else ""
}
rm -f /var/log/slim.log
end script
'';
This style has two big advantages:
- \, ' and " aren't special, only '' and ${. So you get a lot less
escaping in shell scripts / configuration files in Nixpkgs/NixOS.
The delimiter '' is rare in scripts (and can usually be written as
""). ${ is also fairly rare.
Other delimiters such as <<...>>, {{...}} and <|...|> were also
considered but this one appears to have the fewest drawbacks
(thanks Martin).
- Indentation is intelligently stripped so that multi-line strings
can follow the nesting structure of the containing Nix
expression. E.g. in the example above 6 spaces are stripped from
the start of each line. This prevents unnecessary indentation in
generated files (which sometimes even breaks things).
See tests/lang/eval-okay-ind-string.nix for some examples.
$ nix-env -e $(which firefox)
or
$ nix-env -e /nix/store/nywzlygrkfcgz7dfmhm5xixlx1l0m60v-pan-0.132
* nix-env -i: if an argument contains a slash anywhere, treat it as a
path and follow it through symlinks into the Nix store. This allows
things like
$ nix-build -A firefox
$ nix-env -i ./result
* nix-env -q/-i/-e: don't complain when the `*' selector doesn't match
anything. In particular, `nix-env -q \*' doesn't fail anymore on an
empty profile.
but installations/upgrades as well. So `nix-env -ub \*' will
upgrade only those packages for which a substitute is available (or
to be precise, it will upgrade each package to the highest version
for which a substitute is available).
executed in a chroot that contains just the Nix store, the temporary
build directory, and a configurable set of additional directories
(/dev and /proc by default). This allows a bit more purity
enforcement: hidden build-time dependencies on directories such as
/usr or /nix/var/nix/profiles are no longer possible. As an added
benefit, accidental network downloads (cf. NIXPKGS-52) are prevented
as well (because files such as /etc/resolv.conf are not available in
the chroot).
However the usefulness of chroots is diminished by the fact that
many builders depend on /bin/sh, so you need /bin in the list of
additional directories. (And then on non-NixOS you need /lib as
well...)
