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.
This wasn't the default behaviour because:
> We don't enable this by default to avoid the mostly unnecessary work of
> performing an additional build of the package in cases where we build
> the package normally anyway, such as in our pre-merge CI.
Since we have a componentized build, we've solved the duplication.
In the new situation, building both with and without unit tests
isn't any slow than just a build with unit tests, so there's no
point in using the unit-tested build anymore.
By using the otherwise untested build, we reduce the minimum build
time towards the NixOS test, at no cost.
If you want to run all tests, build all attributes.
* 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>
* 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
* 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.
move together all syntactic and semantic information into one
page, and add a page on data types, which in turn links to the syntax and
semantics.
also split out the note on scoping rules into its own page.
Co-authored-by: Ryan Hendrickson <ryan.hendrickson@alum.mit.edu>
* doc: fix `directory` definition in nix-archive.md
Before the change the document implied that directory of a single entry
contained entry:
"type" "directory" "type" directory" "entry" ...
After the change document should expand into:
"type" "directory" "entry" ...
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
* string interpolation escape example
Make it easier to find the documentation, and the example might be enough for most cases.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
