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).
