The worker threads could exit prematurely if they finished processing
all items while the main thread was still adding items. In particular,
this caused hanging nix-store --serve processes in the build farm.
Also, process items from the main thread.
This is a hack to make hydra-queue-runner free its temproots
periodically, thereby ensuring that garbage collection of the
corresponding paths is not blocked until the queue runner is
restarted.
It would be better if temproots could be released earlier than at
process exit. I started working on a RAII object returned by functions
like addToStore() that releases temproots. However, this would be a
pretty massive change so I gave up on it for now.
In particular, process() won't return as long as there are active
items. This prevents work item lambdas from referring to stack frames
that no longer exist.
E.g.
nix run nixpkgs.hello -c hello --greeting Hallo
Note that unlike "nix-shell --command", no quoting of arguments is
necessary.
"-c" (short for "--command") cannot be combined with "--" because they
both consume all remaining arguments. But since installables shouldn't
start with a dash, this is unlikely to cause problems.
Besides being unused, this function has a bug that it will incorrectly
decode the path component Ubuntu\04016.04.2\040LTS\040amd64 as
"Ubuntu.04.2 LTS amd64" instead of "Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS amd64".
The package list is now cached in
~/.cache/nix/package-search.json. This gives a substantial speedup to
"nix search" queries. For example (on an SSD):
First run: (no package search cache, cold page cache)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m6.516s
Second run: (package search cache populated)
$ time nix search blender
Attribute name: nixpkgs.blender
Package name: blender
Version: 2.78c
Description: 3D Creation/Animation/Publishing System
real 0m0.143s
Thus, instead of ‘--option <name> <value>’, you can write ‘--<name>
<value>’. So
--option http-connections 100
becomes
--http-connections 100
Apart from brevity, the difference is that it's not an error to set a
non-existent option via --option, but unrecognized arguments are
fatal.
Boolean options have special treatment: they're mapped to the
argument-less flags ‘--<name>’ and ‘--no-<name>’. E.g.
--option auto-optimise-store false
becomes
--no-auto-optimise-store
