* 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>
The JSON format no longer uses the legacy ATerm `r:` prefixing nonsese,
but separate fields.
Progress on #9866
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
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>
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.
* 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>
- 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.
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>
This makes for more useful manual table of contents, that displays the
information at a glance.
The `nix help-stores` command is kept as-is, even though it will show up
in the manual with the same information as these pages due to the way it
is written as a "`--help`-style" command. Deciding what to do with that
command is left for a later PR.
This change also lists all store types at the top of the respective overview page.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems
update the glossary to point to the new page.
since this is a cross-cutting concern, it warrants its own section in
the manual.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
* document the store concept and its purpose
reword the glossary to link to more existing information instead of
repeating it.
move the store documentation to the top of the table of contents, in
front of the Nix language. this will provide a natural place to
document other aspects of the store as well as the various store types.
move the package management section after the Nix language and before
Advanced Topics to follow the pattern to layer more complex concepts on
top of each other.
this structure of the manual will also nudge beginners to learn Nix
bottom-up and hopefully make more likely that they understand underlying
concepts first before delving into complex use cases that may or may not
be easy to implement with what's currently there.
[John adds this note] The sort of beginner who likes to dive straight into reference documentation should prefer this approach. Conversely, the sort of beginner who would prefer the opposite top-down approach of trying to solve problems before they understand everything that is going on is better off reading other tutorial/guide material anyways, and will just "random-access" the reference manual as a last resort. For such random-access the order doesn't matter, so this restructure doesn't make them any worse off.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
Rather than having a misc tutorial page in the grab-bag "package management" section, this information should just be part of the S3 store docs.
---------
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems>
this is the first thing most beginners see, and it misleads them into
assuming `nix-env` is appropriate for doing anything but setting and
reverting profile generations.
this chapter is the root of most evil around the ecosystem, and today we
finally close it for good.
* document "Import From Derivation"
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
this is a how-to guide which should not be in the reference manual.
it also refers to `nix-env`, which should not be the first thing readers
of the reference manual encounter, as it behaves very differently in
spirit from the rest of Nix.
slightly reword the documentation to be more concise and informative.
This is generally a fine practice: Putting implementations in headers
makes them harder to read and slows compilation. Unfortunately it is
necessary for templates, but we can ameliorate that by putting them in a
separate header. Only files which need to instantiate those templates
will need to include the header with the implementation; the rest can
just include the declaration.
This is now documenting in the contributing guide.
Also, it just happens that these polymorphic serializers are the
protocol agnostic ones. (Worker and serve protocol have the same logic
for these container types.) This means by doing this general template
cleanup, we are also getting a head start on better indicating which
code is protocol-specific and which code is shared between protocols.
While this is not actually a notion in the implementation, it is
explicitly described in the thesis and quite important for understanding
how the store works.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
