The code that counts the number of elided attrs incorrectly used the
per-printer "global" attribute counter instead of a counter that
was relevant only to the current attribute set.
This bug flew under the radar because often the attribute sets aren't
nested, not big enough, or we wouldn't pay attention to the numbers.
I've noticed the issue because the difference underflowed.
Although this behavior is tested by the functional test
lang/eval-fail-bad-string-interpolation-4.nix, the underflow slipped
through review. A simpler reproducer would be as follows, but I
haven't added it to the test suite to keep it simple and marginally
faster.
```
$ nix run nix/2.23.1 -- eval --expr '"" + (let v = { a = { a = 1; b = 2; c = 1; d = 1; e = 1; f = 1; g = 1; h = 1; }; b = { a = 1; b = 1; c = 1; }; }; in builtins.deepSeq v v)'
error:
… while evaluating a path segment
at «string»:1:6:
1| "" + (let v = { a = { a = 1; b = 2; c = 1; d = 1; e = 1; f = 1; g = 1; h = 1; }; b = { a = 1; b = 1; c = 1; }; }; in builtins.deepSeq v v)
| ^
error: cannot coerce a set to a string: { a = { a = 1; b = 2; c = 1; d = 1; e = 1; f = 1; g = 1; h = 1; }; b = { a = 1; «4294967289 attributes elided» }; }
```
this needs a string comparison because there seems to be no other way to
get that information out of bison. usually the location info is going to
be correct (pointing at a bad token), but since EOF isn't a token as
such it'll be wrong in that this case.
this hasn't shown up much so far because a single line ending *is* a
token, so any file formatted in the usual manner (ie, ending in a line
ending) would have its EOF position reported correctly.
the parser treats a plain \r as a newline, error reports do not. this
can lead to interesting divergences if anything makes use of this
feature, with error reports pointing to wrong locations in the input (or
even outside the input altogether).
previously we reported the error at the beginning of the binding
block (for plain inherits) or the beginning of the attr list (for
inherit-from), effectively hiding where exactly the error happened.
this also carries over to runtime positions of attributes in sets as
reported by unsafeGetAttrPos. we're not worried about this changing
observable eval behavior because it *is* marked unsafe, and the new
behavior is much more useful.
we already normalize attr order to lexicographic, doing the same for
formals makes sense. doubly so because the order of formals would
otherwise depend on the context of the expression, which is not quite as
useful as one might expect.
the parser modifies its inputs, which means that sharing them between
the error context reporting system and the parser itself can confuse the
reporting system. usually this led to early truncation of error context
reports which, while not dangerous, can be quite confusing.
desugaring inherit-from to syntactic duplication of the source expr also
duplicates side effects of the source expr (such as trace calls) and
expensive computations (such as derivationStrict).
Commit 83c067c0fa changed `builtins.pathExists`
to resolve symlinks before checking for existence. Consequently, if the path
refers to a symlink itself, existence of the target of the symlink (instead of
the symlink itself) was checked. Restore the previous behavior by skipping
symlink resolution in the last component.
for plain inherits this is really just a stylistic choice, but for
inherit-from it actually fixes an exponential size increase problem
during expr printing (as may happen during assertion failure reporting,
on during duplicate attr detection in the parser)
this also has the effect of sorting let bindings lexicographically
rather than by symbol creation order as was previously done, giving a
better canonicalization in the process.
Pretty-print values in the REPL by printing each item in a list or
attrset on a separate line. When possible, single-item lists and
attrsets are printed on one line, as long as they don't contain a nested
list, attrset, or thunk.
Before:
```
{ attrs = { a = { b = { c = { }; }; }; }; list = [ 1 ]; list' = [ 1 2 3 ]; }
```
After:
```
{
attrs = {
a = {
b = {
c = { };
};
};
};
list = [ 1 ];
list' = [
1
2
3
];
}
```
While preparing PRs like #9753, I've had to change error messages in
dozens of code paths. It would be nice if instead of
EvalError("expected 'boolean' but found '%1%'", showType(v))
we could write
TypeError(v, "boolean")
or similar. Then, changing the error message could be a mechanical
refactor with the compiler pointing out places the constructor needs to
be changed, rather than the error-prone process of grepping through the
codebase. Structured errors would also help prevent the "same" error
from having multiple slightly different messages, and could be a first
step towards error codes / an error index.
This PR reworks the exception infrastructure in `libexpr` to
support exception types with different constructor signatures than
`BaseError`. Actually refactoring the exceptions to use structured data
will come in a future PR (this one is big enough already, as it has to
touch every exception in `libexpr`).
The core design is in `eval-error.hh`. Generally, errors like this:
state.error("'%s' is not a string", getAttrPathStr())
.debugThrow<TypeError>()
are transformed like this:
state.error<TypeError>("'%s' is not a string", getAttrPathStr())
.debugThrow()
The type annotation has moved from `ErrorBuilder::debugThrow` to
`EvalState::error`.
Use `diff --color=always` to print colored output for language test
failures. I've also flipped the arguments so that expected lines missing
from the actual output will be marked with a red `-` and additional
lines found in the actual output will be marked with a green `+`.
Previously it was the other way around, which was very confusing.
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.
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.
Previously, there were two mostly-identical value printers -- one in
`libexpr/eval.cc` (which didn't force values) and one in
`libcmd/repl.cc` (which did force values and also printed ANSI color
codes).
This PR unifies both of these printers into `print.cc` and provides a
`PrintOptions` struct for controlling the output, which allows for
toggling whether values are forced, whether repeated values are tracked,
and whether ANSI color codes are displayed.
Additionally, `PrintOptions` allows tuning the maximum number of
attributes, list items, and bytes in a string that will be displayed;
this makes it ideal for contexts where printing too much output (e.g.
all of Nixpkgs) is distracting. (As requested by @roberth in
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9554#issuecomment-1845095735)
Please read the tests for example output.
Future work:
- It would be nice to provide this function as a builtin, perhaps
`builtins.toStringDebug` -- a printing function that never fails would
be useful when debugging Nix code.
- It would be nice to support customizing `PrintOptions` members on the
command line, e.g. `--option to-string-max-attrs 1000`.
This fixes a segfault on infinite function call recursion (rather than
infinite thunk recursion) by tracking the function call depth in
`EvalState`.
Additionally, to avoid printing extremely long stack traces, stack
frames are now deduplicated, with a `(19997 duplicate traces omitted)`
message. This should only really be triggered in infinite recursion
scenarios.
Before:
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr '(x: x x) (x: x x)'
Segmentation fault: 11
After:
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr '(x: x x) (x: x x)'
error: stack overflow
at «string»:1:14:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr '(x: x x) (x: x x)' --show-trace
error:
… from call site
at «string»:1:1:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… while calling anonymous lambda
at «string»:1:2:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… from call site
at «string»:1:5:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… while calling anonymous lambda
at «string»:1:11:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… from call site
at «string»:1:14:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
(19997 duplicate traces omitted)
error: stack overflow
at «string»:1:14:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
This keeps hint messages, source location information, and source code
snippets grouped together, while making stack traces shorter (so that
more stack frames can be viewed on the same terminal).
Before:
error:
… while evaluating the attribute 'body'
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:4:3:
3|
4| body = x "x";
| ^
5| }
… from call site
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:4:10:
3|
4| body = x "x";
| ^
5| }
… while calling 'x'
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:2:7:
1| let {
2| x = arg: assert arg == "y"; 123;
| ^
3|
error: assertion '(arg == "y")' failed
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:2:12:
1| let {
2| x = arg: assert arg == "y"; 123;
| ^
3|
After:
error:
… while evaluating the attribute 'body'
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:4:3:
3|
4| body = x "x";
| ^
5| }
… from call site
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:4:10:
3|
4| body = x "x";
| ^
5| }
… while calling 'x'
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:2:7:
1| let {
2| x = arg: assert arg == "y"; 123;
| ^
3|
error: assertion '(arg == "y")' failed
at /Users/wiggles/nix/tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-assert.nix:2:12:
1| let {
2| x = arg: assert arg == "y"; 123;
| ^
3|
* 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>
This includes position information in more places, making debugging
easier.
Before:
```
$ nix-instantiate --show-trace --eval tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-using-set-as-attr-name.nix
error:
… while evaluating an attribute name
at «none»:0: (source not available)
error: value is a set while a string was expected
```
After:
```
error:
… while evaluating an attribute name
at /pwd/lang/eval-fail-using-set-as-attr-name.nix:5:10:
4| in
5| attr.${key}
| ^
6|
error: value is a set while a string was expected
```
