Nixpkgs's stdenv setup script sets the "nullglob" option, but doing so
breaks Bash completion on NixOS (when ‘programs.bash.enableCompletion’
is set) and on Ubuntu. So clear that flag afterwards. Of course,
this may break stdenv functions in subtle ways...
Previously, a undefined variable inside a "with" caused an EvalError
(which can be caught), while outside, it caused a ParseError (which
cannot be caught). Now both cause an UndefinedVarError (which cannot
be caught).
Since they don't have location information, they just give you crap
like:
while evaluating the builtin function `getAttr':
while evaluating the builtin function `derivationStrict':
...
If a "with" attribute set fails to evaluate, we have to make sure its
Env record remains unchanged. Otherwise, repeated evaluation gives a
segfault:
nix-repl> :a with 0; { a = x; b = x; }
Added 2 variables.
nix-repl> a
error: value is an integer while an attribute set was expected
nix-repl> b
Segmentation fault
‘x = <expr>’ is short for ‘:a { x = <expr>; }’. Note that the
right-hand side refers to the original scope, so you get:
nix-repl> x = 1
nix-repl> x = x + 1
nix-repl> x
2
rather than an infinite recursion.
Example:
$ nix-repl '<nixos>'
> config.services.xserver.desktop<TAB>
comletes to
> config.services.xserver.desktopManager
You also get suggestions if there are multiple matches:
> config.services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4
config.services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4.enable
config.services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4.phononBackends
As discovered by Todd Veldhuizen, the shell started by nix-shell has
its affinity set to a single CPU. This is because nix-shell connects
to the Nix daemon, which causes the affinity hack to be applied. So
we turn this off for Perl programs.
This is equivalent to running ‘nix-env -e '*'’ first, except that it
happens in a single transaction. Thus, ‘nix-env -i pkgs...’ replaces
the profile with the specified set of packages.
The main motivation is to support declarative package management
(similar to environment.systemPackages in NixOS). That is, if you
have a specification ‘profile.nix’ like this:
with import <nixpkgs> {};
[ thunderbird
geeqie
...
]
then after any change to ‘profile.nix’, you can run:
$ nix-env -f profile.nix -ir
to update the profile to match the specification. (Without the ‘-r’
flag, if you remove a package from ‘profile.nix’, it won't be removed
from the actual profile.)
Suggested by @zefhemel.
