given `nix-copy-closure` exists, it doesn't make much sense to do
nix-store --export $paths | nix-store --import --store ssh://foo@bar
since that dumps everything rather than granularly transferring store
objects as needed.
therefore, pick an example where dumping the entire closure into a file
actually makes a difference, such as when deploying to airgapped systems.
In addition:
- Take the opportunity to add a bunch more missing hyperlinks, too.
- Remove some glossary entries that are now subsumed by dedicated pages.
We used to not be able to do this without breaking link fragments, but
now we can, so pick up where we left off.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
- add links to definitions of terms
- one sentence per line
- be more specific about which store is used for the import
- clearly distinguish store paths and store objects
- make a recommendation to use `nix-copy-closure` for efficient SSH transfers
the individual commands' documentation should provide enough examples to
make sense of the options and judge what to use and when. proper guides,
which would require a more elaborate setup to show off Nix's
capabilities are out of scope for the reference manual.
* doc: convention improvements for copying closure
use -P, which only considers executables but not shell builtins
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
pararameterisation is not actually needed the way things are currently
set up, and it confused me when trying to understand what the code does.
all but one test sources vars-and-functions.sh, which nominally only
defines variables, but in practice is always coupled with the actual
initialisation. while the cleaner way of making this more legible would
be to source variables and initialisation separately, this would produce
a huge diff.
the change requires a few small fixes to keep the tests working:
- only create test home directory during initialisation
that vars-and-functions.sh wrote to the file system seems not write
- fix creation of the test directory
due to statefulness, the test home directory was implicitly creating
the test root, too. decoupling that made it apparent that this was
probably not intentional, and certainly confusing.
- only source vars-and-functions.sh if init.sh is not needed
there is one test case that only needs a helper function but no
initialisation side effects
- remove some unnecessary cleanups and split parts of re-used test code
there were confusing bits in how initialisation code was repurposed,
which break if trying to refactor the outer layers naively...
* Document string context
Now what we have enough primops, we can document how string contexts
work.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Théophane Hufschmitt <7226587+thufschmitt@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
Co-authored-by: Felix Uhl <iFreilicht@users.noreply.github.com>
Different parts of the project honor different sets of proxy environment
variables. With this commit all parts of the project will honor the same
set of proxy environment variables.
---------
Co-authored-by: Your Name <you@example.com>
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems>
When trying the „nix-store info“ commands on this page I received the error "error: 'info' is not a recognised command". According to https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/9349 info seems to have been an alias for ping. So why not just replace info with ping?
* move single-user uninstall to the end
this is not the default method of installation, and therefore irrelevant
for most users.
* move the backup restore instructions to the first step
for most users we can expect that the system-wide shell init files were
not ever touched, so we can as well tell them to do the most likely
thing.
from experience, while it's not necessarily safe to just mess with these
files, most people are simply confused by the complexity of
instructions.
* provide more detailed instructions for using `sudo vifs`
we can expect most beginners not to ever have used `vi`, and they will
probably need some hand-holding.
* express instructions as a script
Co-authored-by: wamirez <wamirez@protonmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
I've added the new local.mk to the package sources. While this
should not be needed for the build, it is the simplest solution,
and won't cause many extra rebuilds, because the file won't change
very often.
Now that we have a few things identifying content address methods by
name, we should be consistent about it.
Move up the `parseHashAlgoOpt` for tidiness too.
Discussed this change for consistency's sake as part of #8876
Co-authored-by: Eelco Dolstra <edolstra@gmail.com>
This requires `--substitute-on-destination` if you want the remote side
to substitute instead of copying if possible.
For completeness sake, document it here.
Also, the stable Nix from nixpkgs is still 2.18, so more folks may
stumble upon this when this is bumped, so I'd expect this to be actually
useful.
Closes#10182
* show Nix logo in the manual
the location of files is hard-coded by mdBook.
there is also seems to be no way to define custom templates, therefore
all styling has to be done in the CSS override.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
I was using by mistake the .#nix-clangStdenv shell to retrieve clangd.
This clangd is unusable with the project and constantly segfaults.
Let's explicitly state which shell the user should use in the docs.
I don't really understand the source of this segfault. I assume it's
related to a clang version incompatibility. (16.0.6 for
.#nix-clangStdenv 14.0.6 for .#native-clangStdenvPackages)
- Align the “frequent” release cycle with the calendar
- The 6-month release cycle is hard to keep track of. A monthly
release will make it much easier to remember the release date.
- Officialise the support for a stable version maintained for as long as NixOS stable
- This is already the case in practice, it just happens that the
“stable” Nixpkgs version is whichever version was deemed
stable-enough at the time of the NixOS release.
Officialise that by cutting a new major release alongside each NixOS one.
Note that this breaks whatever semver compatibility Nix might pretend to
have, but I don't think it makes sense any way.
Part of RFC 133
Extracted from our old IPFS branches.
Co-Authored-By: Matthew Bauer <mjbauer95@gmail.com>
Co-Authored-By: Carlo Nucera <carlo.nucera@protonmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Florian Klink <flokli@flokli.de>
- move all reference documentation to the `builders` configuration setting
- reword documentation on machine specification, add examples
- disable showing the default value, as it rendered as `@/dummy/machines`, which is wrong
- highlight the examples
- link to the configuration docs for distributed builds
- builder -> build machine
Co-authored-by: Janik H <janik@aq0.de>
the interesting information is on the proper pages, and is now presented
a bit more prominently.
the paragraph was a bit confusing to read, also because an anchor link
to an inline definition was in the middle of the sentence. "local store"
now has its own glossary entry.
There's probably more that can be said, but I thought it might be helpful to put something here about how to access elements of a list for folks coming from more or less any other programming language. If this is rarely used, it might be nice to add to the documentation something about why it's rarely used.
how the different invocations relate to each other seems be
confusing, which is relatable because one has to wire it up in your head
while reading. an explicit reference should make it unambiguous and
easier to notice due to links being highlighted.
This extends the `error: cannot coerce a TYPE to a string` message
to print the value that could not be coerced. This helps with debugging
by making it easier to track down where the value is being produced
from, especially in errors with deep or unhelpful stack traces.
Good to document these formats separately from commands that happen to
use them.
Eventually I would like this and `builtins.derivation` to refer to a
store section on derivations that is authoritative, but that doesn't yet
exist, and will take some time to make. So I think we're just best off
merging this now as is.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
A small step towards https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6507
I believe this incomplete definition is one that can be agreed on.
It would be nice to define more, but considering that the issue
also proposes changes to the design, I believe we should hold off
on those.
As for the wording, we're dealing with some very general and vague
terms, that have to be treated with exactly the right amount of
vagueness to be effective.
I start out with a fairly abstract definition of package.
1. to establish a baseline so we know what we're talking about
2. so that we can go in and clarify that we have an extra, Nix-specific
definition.
"Software" is notoriously ill-defined, so it makes a great qualifier
for package, which we don't really want to pin down either, because
that would just get us lost in discussion.
We can come back to this after we've done 6057 and a few years in a
desert cave.
Then comes the "package attribute set" definition.
I can already hear Valentin say "That's not even Nix's responsibility!"
and on some days I might even agree.
However, in our current reality, we have `nix-env`, `nix-build` and
`nix profile`, which query the `outputName` attribute - among others -
which just don't exist in the derivation.
For those who can't believe what they're reading:
$ nix-build --expr 'with import ./. {}; bind // {outputName = "lib";}' --no-out-link
this path will be fetched (1.16 MiB download, 3.72 MiB unpacked):
/nix/store/rfk6klfx3z972gavxlw6iypnj6j806ma-bind-9.18.21-lib
copying path '/nix/store/rfk6klfx3z972gavxlw6iypnj6j806ma-bind-9.18.21-lib' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
/nix/store/rfk6klfx3z972gavxlw6iypnj6j806ma-bind-9.18.21-lib
and let me tell you that bind is not a library.
So anyway, that's also proof of why calling this a "derivation attrset" would be wrong, despite the type attribute.
The Nix team has requested that this output format remain unchanged.
I've added a warning to the man page explaining that `nix-instantiate
--eval` output will not parse correctly in many situations.
channels make everything more stateful, and therefore more complicated
and potentially confusing, but aren't needed for this task, so don't encourage their use.
* deduplicate installation instructions
- reorder sections to present pinned installation more prominently
- remove outdated notes on the macOS installer rework
- update instructions to handle the installer tarball
Co-authored-by: Travis A. Everett <travis.a.everett@gmail.com>
It might seem obnoxious to have yet more configure flags, but I found
controlling both the unit and functional tests with one flag was quite
confusing because they are so different:
- unit tests depending on building, functional tests don't (e.g. when
we test already-built Nix)
- unit tests can be installed, functional tests cannot
- unit tests neeed extra libraries (GTest, RapidCheck), functional
tests need extra executables (jq).
- unit tests are run by `make check`, functional tests are run by `make
installcheck`
Really on a technical level, they seem wholly independent. Only on a
human level ("they are both are tests") do they have anything in common.
I had messed up the logic in cross builds because of this. Now I
split the flag in two (and cleaned up a few other inconsistencies), and
the logic fixed itself.
Co-Authored-By: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
* Print the value in `error: cannot coerce` messages
This extends the `error: cannot coerce a TYPE to a string` message
to print the value that could not be coerced. This helps with debugging
by making it easier to track down where the value is being produced
from, especially in errors with deep or unhelpful stack traces.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
