This allows all supported fetchers to be used, e.g.
builtins.fetchTree {
type = "github";
owner = "NixOS";
repo = "nix";
rev = "d4df99a3349cf2228a8ee78dea320afef86eb3ba";
}
This improves reproducibility and may be faster than fetching from the
original source (especially for git/hg inputs, but probably also for
github inputs - our binary cache is probably faster than GitHub's
dynamically generated tarballs).
Unfortunately this doesn't work for the top-level flake since even if
we know the NAR hash of the tree, we don't know the other tree
attributes such as revCount and lastModified.
Fixes#3253.
Typical usage:
$ nix flake update ~/Misc/eelco-configurations/hagbard --update-input nixpkgs
to update the 'nixpkgs' input of a flake while leaving every other
input unchanged.
The argument is an input path, so you can do e.g. '--update-input
dwarffs/nixpkgs' to update an input of an input.
Fixes#2928.
Added a flag --no-update-lock-file to barf if the lock file needs any
changes. This is useful for CI systems if you're building a
checkout. Fixes#2947.
Renamed --no-save-lock-file to --no-write-lock-file. It is now a fatal
error if the lock file needs changes but --no-write-lock-file is not
given.
E.g.
$ nix flake update ~/Misc/eelco-configurations/hagbard \
--override-input 'dwarffs/nixpkgs' ../my-nixpkgs
overrides the 'nixpkgs' input of the 'dwarffs' input of the top-level
flake.
Fixes#2837.
When computing a lock file, we now respect the lock files of flake
inputs. This is important for usability / reproducibility. For
example, the 'nixops' flake depends on the 'nixops-aws' and
'nixops-hetzner' repositories. So when the 'nixops' flake is used in
another flake, we want the versions of 'nixops-aws' and
'nixops-hetzner' locked by the the 'nixops' flake because those
presumably have been tested.
This can lead to a proliferation of versions of flakes like 'nixpkgs'
(since every flake's lock file could depend on a different version of
'nixpkgs'). This is not a major issue when using Nixpkgs overlays or
NixOS modules, since then the top-level flake composes those
overlays/modules into *its* version of Nixpkgs and all other versions
are ignored. Lock file computation has been made a bit more lazy so it
won't try to fetch all those versions of 'nixpkgs'.
However, in case it's necessary to minimize flake versions, there now
are two input attributes that allow this. First, you can copy an input
from another flake, as follows:
inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "dwarffs/nixpkgs";
This states that the calling flake's 'nixpkgs' input shall be the same
as the 'nixpkgs' input of the 'dwarffs' input.
Second, you can override inputs of inputs:
inputs.nixpkgs.url = github:edolstra/nixpkgs/<hash>;
inputs.nixops.inputs.nixpkgs.url = github:edolstra/nixpkgs/<hash>;
or equivalently, using 'follows':
inputs.nixpkgs.url = github:edolstra/nixpkgs/<hash>;
inputs.nixops.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
This states that the 'nixpkgs' input of the 'nixops' input shall be
the same as the calling flake's 'nixpkgs' input.
Finally, at '-v' Nix now prints the changes to the lock file, e.g.
$ nix flake update ~/Misc/eelco-configurations/hagbard
inputs of flake 'git+file:///home/eelco/Misc/eelco-configurations?subdir=hagbard' changed:
updated 'nixpkgs': 'github:edolstra/nixpkgs/7845bf5f4b3013df1cf036e9c9c3a55a30331db9' -> 'github:edolstra/nixpkgs/03f3def66a104a221aac8b751eeb7075374848fd'
removed 'nixops'
removed 'nixops/nixops-aws'
removed 'nixops/nixops-hetzner'
removed 'nixops/nixpkgs'
Fixes
error: derivation '/nix/store/klivma7r7h5lndb99f7xxmlh5whyayvg-zlib-1.2.11.drv' has incorrect output '/nix/store/fv98nnx5ykgbq8sqabilkgkbc4169q05-zlib-1.2.11-dev', should be '/nix/store/adm7pilzlj3z5k249s8b4wv3scprhzi1-zlib-1.2.11-dev'
Includes the expression of the condition in the assertion message if
the assertion failed, making assertions much easier to debug. eg.
error: assertion (withPython -> (python2Packages != null)) failed at pkgs/tools/security/nmap/default.nix:11:1
As fromTOML supports \u and \U escapes, bring fromJSON on par. As JSON defaults
to UTF-8 encoding (every JSON parser must support UTF-8), this change parses the
`\u hex hex hex hex` sequence (\u followed by 4 hexadecimal digits) into an
UTF-8 representation.
Add a test to verify correct parsing, using all escape sequences from json.org.
This prevents them from being inlined. On gcc 9, this reduces the
stack size needed for
nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs>' -A texlive.combined.scheme-full --dry-run
from 12.9 MiB to 4.8 MiB.
There is no termination condition for evaluation of cyclical
expression paths which can lead to infinite loops. This addresses
one spot in the parser in a similar fashion as utils.cc/canonPath
does.
This issue can be reproduced by something like:
```
ln -s a b
ln -s b a
nix-instantiate -E 'import ./a'
```
Most functions now take a StorePath argument rather than a Path (which
is just an alias for std::string). The StorePath constructor ensures
that the path is syntactically correct (i.e. it looks like
<store-dir>/<base32-hash>-<name>). Similarly, functions like
buildPaths() now take a StorePathWithOutputs, rather than abusing Path
by adding a '!<outputs>' suffix.
Note that the StorePath type is implemented in Rust. This involves
some hackery to allow Rust values to be used directly in C++, via a
helper type whose destructor calls the Rust type's drop()
function. The main issue is the dynamic nature of C++ move semantics:
after we have moved a Rust value, we should not call the drop function
on the original value. So when we move a value, we set the original
value to bitwise zero, and the destructor only calls drop() if the
value is not bitwise zero. This should be sufficient for most types.
Also lots of minor cleanups to the C++ API to make it more modern
(e.g. using std::optional and std::string_view in some places).
The FunctionCallTrace object consumes a few hundred bytes of stack
space, even when tracing is disabled. This was causing stack overflows:
$ nix-instantiate '<nixpkgs> -A texlive.combined.scheme-full --dry-run
error: stack overflow (possible infinite recursion)
This is with the default stack size of 8 MiB.
Putting the object on the heap reduces stack usage to < 5 MiB.
Also, fetchGit now runs in O(1) memory since we pipe the output of
'git archive' directly into unpackTarball() (rather than first reading
it all into memory).
E.g.
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A hello --experimental-features no-url-literals
error: URL literals are disabled, at /nix/store/vsjamkzh15r3c779q2711az826hqgvzr-nixpkgs-20.03pre194957.bef773ed53f/nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix:1236:11
Helps with implementing https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/45.
The store path is not enough. For example, when we build a dirty tree,
commit, and build the clean tree, a re-evaluation is necessary because
the flake may depend on the lastModified or revCount attributes.
Add missing docstring on InstallableCommand. Also, some of these were wrapped
when they're right next to a line longer than the unwrapped line, so we can just
unwrap them to save vertical space.
git show seems to print the entire tag message when being called on a tag
instead of a commit. git log instead always prints the correct timestamp
in my tests.
The error nix prints is: `error: stoull`.
Fixes
error: the content hash of flake '/home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs-flake?ref=HEAD&rev=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000' doesn't match the hash recorded in the referring lockfile
Experimental features are now opt-in. There are currently two
experimental features: "nix-command" (which enables the "nix"
command), and "flakes" (which enables support for flakes). This will
allow us to merge experimental features more quickly, without
committing to supporting them indefinitely.
Typical usage:
$ nix build --experimental-features 'nix-command flakes' nixpkgs#hello
In particular, when building a flake lock file, inputs like 'nixpkgs'
are now downloaded only once. Previously, it would fetch
https://api.github.com/repos/<owner>/<repo>/tarball/<ref> and then
later https://api.github.com/repos/<owner>/<repo>/tarball/<rev>, even
though they produce the same result.
Git and GitHub now also share a cache that maps revs to a store path
and other info.
Fixes
$ nix build
fatal: bad revision 'HEAD'
error: program 'git' failed with exit code 128
on a new flake. It is now detected as a dirty tree with revCount = 0.
For example, if the top-level flake depends on
"nixpkgs/release-19.03", and one of its dependencies depends on
"nixpkgs", then the latter will be mapped to "nixpkgs/release-19.03",
rather than whatever the default branch of "nixpkgs" is. Thus you get
only one "nixpkgs" dependency rather than two.
This currently only works in a breadth-first way, so the other way
around (i.e. if the top-level flake depends on "nixpkgs", and a
dependency depends on "nixpkgs/release-19.03") still results in two
"nixpkgs" dependencies.
If 'input.<name>.uri' changes, then the entry in the lockfile for
input <name> should be considered stale.
Also print some messages when lock file entries are added/updated.
So you now get
$ nix build
error: path '.' is not a flake (because it does not reference a Git repository)
rather than
$ nix build
error: unsupported argument '.'
Instead of a list, inputs are now an attrset like
inputs = {
nixpkgs.uri = github:NixOS/nixpkgs;
};
If 'uri' is omitted, than the flake is a lookup in the flake registry, e.g.
inputs = {
nixpkgs = {};
};
but in that case, you can also just omit the input altogether and
specify it as an argument to the 'outputs' function, as in
outputs = { self, nixpkgs }: ...
This also gets rid of 'nonFlakeInputs', which are now just a special
kind of input that have a 'flake = false' attribute, e.g.
inputs = {
someRepo = {
uri = github:example/repo;
flake = false;
};
};
With this patch, and this file I called `log.py`:
#!/usr/bin/env nix-shell
#!nix-shell -i python3 -p python3 --pure
import sys
from pprint import pprint
stack = []
timestack = []
for line in open(sys.argv[1]):
components = line.strip().split(" ", 2)
if components[0] != "function-trace":
continue
direction = components[1]
components = components[2].rsplit(" ", 2)
loc = components[0]
_at = components[1]
time = int(components[2])
if direction == "entered":
stack.append(loc)
timestack.append(time)
elif direction == "exited":
dur = time - timestack.pop()
vst = ";".join(stack)
print(f"{vst} {dur}")
stack.pop()
and:
nix-instantiate --trace-function-calls -vvvv ../nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/release.nix -A unstable > log.matthewbauer 2>&1
./log.py ./log.matthewbauer > log.matthewbauer.folded
flamegraph.pl --title matthewbauer-post-pr log.matthewbauer.folded > log.matthewbauer.folded.svg
I can make flame graphs like: http://gsc.io/log.matthewbauer.folded.svg
---
Includes test cases around function call failures and tryEval. Uses
RAII so the finish is always called at the end of the function.
--no-net causes tarballTtl to be set to the largest 32-bit integer,
which causes comparison like 'time + tarballTtl < other_time' to
fail on 32-bit systems. So cast them to 64-bit first.
https://hydra.nixos.org/build/95076624
(cherry picked from commit 29ccb2e969)
Also, make fetchGit and fetchMercurial update allowedPaths properly.
(Maybe the evaluator, rather than the caller of the evaluator, should
apply toRealPath(), but that's a bigger change.)
(cherry picked from commit 5c34d66538)
--no-net causes tarballTtl to be set to the largest 32-bit integer,
which causes comparison like 'time + tarballTtl < other_time' to
fail on 32-bit systems. So cast them to 64-bit first.
https://hydra.nixos.org/build/95076624
This exploits the hermetic nature of flake evaluation to speed up
repeated evaluations of a flake output attribute.
For example (doing 'nix build' on an already present package):
$ time nix build nixpkgs:firefox
real 0m1.497s
user 0m1.160s
sys 0m0.139s
$ time nix build nixpkgs:firefox
real 0m0.052s
user 0m0.038s
sys 0m0.007s
The cache is ~/.cache/nix/eval-cache-v1.sqlite, which has entries like
INSERT INTO Attributes VALUES(
X'92a907d4efe933af2a46959b082cdff176aa5bfeb47a98fabd234809a67ab195',
'packages.firefox',
1,
'/nix/store/pbalzf8x19hckr8cwdv62rd6g0lqgc38-firefox-67.0.drv /nix/store/g6q0gx0v6xvdnizp8lrcw7c4gdkzana0-firefox-67.0 out');
where the hash 92a9... is a fingerprint over the flake store path and
the contents of the lockfile. Because flakes are evaluated in pure
mode, this uniquely identifies the evaluation result.
As long as the flake input is locked, it is now only fetched when it
is evaluated (e.g. "nixpkgs" is fetched when
"inputs.nixpkgs.<something>" is evaluated).
This required adding an "id" attribute to the members of "inputs" in
lockfiles, e.g.
"inputs": {
"nixpkgs/release-19.03": {
"id": "nixpkgs",
"inputs": {},
"narHash": "sha256-eYtxncIMFVmOHaHBtTdPGcs/AnJqKqA6tHCm0UmPYQU=",
"nonFlakeInputs": {},
"uri": "github:edolstra/nixpkgs/e9d5882bb861dc48f8d46960e7c820efdbe8f9c1"
}
}
because the flake ID needs to be known beforehand to construct the
"inputs" attrset.
Fixes#2913.
This is primarily useful for version string generation, where we need
a monotonically increasing number. The revcount is the preferred thing
to use, but isn't available for GitHub flakes (since it requires
fetching the entire history). The last commit timestamp OTOH can be
extracted from GitHub tarballs.
This ensures that flakes don't get garbage-collected, which is
important to get nix-channel-like behaviour.
For example, running
$ nix build hydra:
will create a GC root
~/.cache/nix/flake-closures/hydra -> /nix/store/xarfiqcwa4w8r4qpz1a769xxs8c3phgn-flake-closure
where the contents/references of the linked file in the store are the
flake source trees used by the 'hydra' flake:
/nix/store/n6d5f5lkpfjbmkyby0nlg8y1wbkmbc7i-source
/nix/store/vbkg4zy1qd29fnhflsv9k2j9jnbqd5m2-source
/nix/store/z46xni7d47s5wk694359mq9ay353ar94-source
Note that this in itself is not enough to allow offline use; the
fetcher for the flakeref (e.g. fetchGit or downloadCached) must not
fail if it cannot fetch the latest version of the file, so long as it
knows a cached version.
Issue #2868.
It was getting confused between logical and real store paths.
Also, make fetchGit and fetchMercurial update allowedPaths properly.
(Maybe the evaluator, rather than the caller of the evaluator, should
apply toRealPath(), but that's a bigger change.)
For text files it is possible to do it like so:
`builtins.hashString "sha256" (builtins.readFile /tmp/a)`
but that doesn't work for binary files.
With builtins.hashFile any kind of file can be conveniently hashed.
This ensures that the lock file is updated *before* evaluating it, and
that it gets updated for any nix command, not just 'nix build'.
Also, while computing the lock file, allow arbitrary registry lookups,
not just at top-level.
Also, improve some error messages slightly.
Also allow "." as an installable to refer to the flake in the current
directory. E.g.
$ nix build .
will build 'provides.defaultPackage' in the flake in the current
directory.
Unlike file://<path>, this allows the path to be a dirty Git tree, so
nix build /path/to/flake:attr
is a convenient way to test building a local flake.
The general syntax for an installable is now
<flakeref>:<attrpath>. The attrpath is relative to the flake's
'provides.packages' or 'provides' if the former doesn't yield a
result. E.g.
$ nix build nixpkgs:hello
is equivalent to
$ nix build nixpkgs:packages.hello
Also, '<flakeref>:' can be omitted, in which case it defaults to
'nixpkgs', e.g.
$ nix build hello
This allows using an arbitrary "provides" attribute from the specified
flake. For example:
nix build --flake nixpkgs packages.hello
(Maybe provides.packages should be used for consistency...)
We want to encourage a brave new world of hermetic evaluation for
source-level reproducibility, so flakes should not poke around in the
filesystem outside of their explicit dependencies.
Note that the default installation source remains impure in that it
can refer to mutable flakes, so "nix build nixpkgs.hello" still works
(and fetches the latest nixpkgs, unless it has been pinned by the
user).
A problem with pure evaluation is that builtins.currentSystem is
unavailable. For the moment, I've hard-coded "x86_64-linux" in the
nixpkgs flake. Eventually, "system" should be a flake function
argument.
For example, github:edolstra/dwarffs is more-or-less equivalent to
https://github.com/edolstra/dwarffs.git. It's a much faster way to get
GitHub repositories: it fetches tarballs rather than entire Git
repositories. It also allows fetching specific revisions by hash
without specifying a ref (e.g. a branch name):
github:edolstra/dwarffs/41c0c1bf292ea3ac3858ff393b49ca1123dbd553
Previously, plain derivation paths in the string context (e.g. those
that arose from builtins.storePath on a drv file, not those that arose
from accessing .drvPath of a derivation) were treated somewhat like
derivaiton paths derived from .drvPath, except their dependencies
weren't recursively added to the input set. With this change, such
plain derivation paths are simply treated as paths and added to the
source inputs set accordingly, simplifying context handling code and
removing the inconsistency. If drvPath-like behavior is desired, the
.drv file can be imported and then .drvPath can be accessed.
This is a backwards-incompatibility, but storePath is never used on
drv files within nixpkgs and almost never used elsewhere.
Trying to fetch refs that are not in refs/heads currently fails because
it looks for refs/heads/refs/foo instead of refs/foo.
eg.
builtins.fetchGit {
url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git;
ref = "refs/pull/1024/head;
}
SRI hashes (https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/) combine the hash algorithm and
a base-64 hash. This allows more concise and standard hash
specifications. For example, instead of
import <nix/fetchurl.nl> {
url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
sha256 = "5d22dad058d5c800d65a115f919da22938c50dd6ba98c5e3a183172d149840a4";
};
you can write
import <nix/fetchurl.nl> {
url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
hash = "sha256-XSLa0FjVyADWWhFfkZ2iKTjFDda6mMXjoYMXLRSYQKQ=";
};
In fixed-output derivations, the outputHashAlgo is no longer mandatory
if outputHash specifies the hash (either as an SRI or in the old
"<type>:<hash>" format).
'nix hash-{file,path}' now print hashes in SRI format by default. I
also reverted them to use SHA-256 by default because that's what we're
using most of the time in Nixpkgs.
Suggested by @zimbatm.
This is already done by coerceToString(), provided that the argument
is a path (e.g. 'fetchGit ./bla'). It fixes the handling of URLs like
git@github.com:owner/repo.git. It breaks 'fetchGit "./bla"', but that
was never intended to work anyway and is inconsistent with other
builtin functions (e.g. 'readFile "./bla"' fails).
Using a 64bit integer on 32bit systems will come with a bit of a
performance overhead, but given that Nix doesn't use a lot of integers
compared to other types, I think the overhead is negligible also
considering that 32bit systems are in decline.
The biggest advantage however is that when we use a consistent integer
size across all platforms it's less likely that we miss things that we
break due to that. One example would be:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/44233
On Hydra it will evaluate, because the evaluator runs on a 64bit
machine, but when evaluating the same on a 32bit machine it will fail,
so using 64bit integers should make that consistent.
While the change of the type in value.hh is rather easy to do, we have a
few more options available for doing the conversion in the lexer:
* Via an #ifdef on the architecture and using strtol() or strtoll()
accordingly depending on which architecture we are. For the #ifdef
we would need another AX_COMPILE_CHECK_SIZEOF in configure.ac.
* Using istringstream, which would involve copying the value.
* As we're already using boost, lexical_cast might be a good idea.
Spoiler: I went for the latter, first of all because lexical_cast does
have an overload for const char* and second of all, because it doesn't
involve copying around the input string. Also, because istringstream
seems to come with a bigger overhead than boost::lexical_cast:
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/release/doc/html/boost_lexical_cast/performance.html
The first method (still using strtol/strtoll) also wasn't something I
pursued further, because it is also locale-aware which I doubt is what
we want, given that the regex for int is [0-9]+.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
Fixes: #2339
The current usage technically works by putting multiple different
repos in to the same git directory. However, it is very slow as
Git tries very hard to find common commits between the two
repositories. If the two repositories are large (like Nixpkgs and
another long-running project,) it is maddeningly slow.
This change busts the cache for existing deployments, but users
will be promptly repaid in per-repository performance.
In EvalState::checkSourcePath, the path is checked against the list of
allowed paths first and later it's checked again *after* resolving
symlinks.
The resolving of the symlinks is done via canonPath, which also strips
out "../" and "./". However after the canonicalisation the error message
pointing out that the path is not allowed prints the symlink target in
the error message.
Even if we'd suppress the message, symlink targets could still be leaked
if the symlink target doesn't exist (in this case the error is thrown in
canonPath).
So instead, we now do canonPath() without symlink resolving first before
even checking against the list of allowed paths and then later do the
symlink resolving and checking the allowed paths again.
The first call to canonPath() should get rid of all the "../" and "./",
so in theory the only way to leak a symlink if the attacker is able to
put a symlink in one of the paths allowed by restricted evaluation mode.
For the latter I don't think this is part of the threat model, because
if the attacker can write to that path, the attack vector is even
larger.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@nix.build>
forceValue() were called after a value is copied effectively forcing only one of the copies keeping another copy not evaluated.
This resulted in its evaluation of the same lazy value more than once (the number of hits is not big though)
This reduces the risk of object liveness misdetection. For example,
Glibc has an internal variable "mp_" that often points to a Boehm
object, keeping it alive unnecessarily. Since we don't store any
actual roots in global variables, we can just disable data segment
scanning.
With this, the max RSS doing 100 evaluations of
nixos.tests.firefox.x86_64-linux.drvPath went from 718 MiB to 455 MiB.
If the Env denotes a 'with', then values[0] may be an Expr* cast to a
Value*. For code that generically traverses Values/Envs, it's useful
to know this.
E.g. this makes
nix eval --restrict-eval -I /nix/store/foo '(builtins.readFile "/nix/store/foo/symlink/bla")'
(where /nix/store/foo/symlink is a symlink to another path in the
closure of /nix/store/foo) succeed.
This fixes a regression in Hydra compared to Nix 1.x (where there were
no restrictions at all on access to the Nix store).
Doing so prevents emacs tags from working, as well as makes the code extremely
confusing for a newbie.
In the prior state, if someone wants to find the definition of "ExprApp" for
example, a grep through the code reveals nothing. Since the definition could be
hiding in numerous ".h" files, it's really difficult to find. This personally
took me several hours to figure out.
Flex's regexes have an annoying feature: the dot matches everything
except a newline. This causes problems for expressions like:
"${0}\
"
where the backslash-newline combination matches this rule instead of the
intended one mentioned in the comment:
<STRING>\$|\\|\$\\ {
/* This can only occur when we reach EOF, otherwise the above
(...|\$[^\{\"\\]|\\.|\$\\.)+ would have triggered.
This is technically invalid, but we leave the problem to the
parser who fails with exact location. */
return STR;
}
However, the parser actually accepts the resulting token sequence
('"' DOLLAR_CURLY 0 '}' STR '"'), which is a problem because the lexer
rule didn't assign anything to yylval. Ultimately this leads to a crash
when dereferencing a NULL pointer in ExprConcatStrings::bindVars().
The fix does change the syntax of the language in some corner cases
but I think it's only turning previously invalid (or crashing) syntax
to valid syntax. E.g.
"a\
b"
and
''a''\
b''
were previously syntax errors but now both result in "a\nb".
Found by afl-fuzz.
Otherwise, running e.g.
nix-instantiate --eval -E --strict 'builtins.replaceStrings [""] ["X"] "abc"'
would just hang in an infinite loop.
Found by afl-fuzz.
First attempt of this was reverted in e2d71bd186 because it caused
another infinite loop, which is fixed now and a test added.
Otherwise, running e.g.
nix-instantiate --eval -E --strict 'builtins.replaceStrings [""] ["X"] "abc"'
would just hang in an infinite loop.
Found by afl-fuzz.
Instead of having lexicographicOrder() create a temporary sorted array
of Attr*:s and copying attr names from that, copy the attr names
first and then sort that.
builtins.path allows specifying the name of a path (which makes paths
with store-illegal names now addable), allows adding paths with flat
instead of recursive hashes, allows specifying a filter (so is a
generalization of filterSource), and allows specifying an expected
hash (enabling safe path adding in pure mode).
In this mode, the following restrictions apply:
* The builtins currentTime, currentSystem and storePath throw an
error.
* $NIX_PATH and -I are ignored.
* fetchGit and fetchMercurial require a revision hash.
* fetchurl and fetchTarball require a sha256 attribute.
* No file system access is allowed outside of the paths returned by
fetch{Git,Mercurial,url,Tarball}. Thus 'nix build -f ./foo.nix' is
not allowed.
Thus, the evaluation result is completely reproducible from the
command line arguments. E.g.
nix build --pure-eval '(
let
nix = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; rev = "9c927de4b179a6dd210dd88d34bda8af4b575680"; };
nixpkgs = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; ref = "release-17.09"; rev = "66b4de79e3841530e6d9c6baf98702aa1f7124e4"; };
in (import (nix + "/release.nix") { inherit nix nixpkgs; }).build.x86_64-linux
)'
The goal is to enable completely reproducible and traceable
evaluation. For example, a NixOS configuration could be fully
described by a single Git commit hash. 'nixos-rebuild' would do
something like
nix build --pure-eval '(
(import (fetchGit { url = file:///my-nixos-config; rev = "..."; })).system
')
where the Git repository /my-nixos-config would use further fetchGit
calls or Git externals to fetch Nixpkgs and whatever other
dependencies it has. Either way, the commit hash would uniquely
identify the NixOS configuration and allow it to reproduced.
For example, you can write
src = fetchgit ./.;
and if ./. refers to an unclean working tree, that tree will be copied
to the Nix store. This removes the need for "cleanSource".
