to make the Refs table more space-efficient. For instance, this
reduces the size of the database on my laptop from 93 MiB to 18
MiB. (It was 72 MiB with the old schema on an ext3 disk with a 1
KiB block size.)
This prevents remote builders from being killed by the
`max-silent-time' inactivity monitor while they are waiting for a
long garbage collection to finish. This happens fairly often in the
Hydra build farm.
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64. Without it, functions like stat() fail on
large file sizes. This happened with a Nix store on squashfs:
$ nix-store --dump /tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds > /dev/null
error: getting attributes of path `/tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds': Value too large for defined data type
$ stat /tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds
File: `/tmp/mnt/46wzqnk4cbdwh1dclhrpqnnz1icak6n7-local-net-cmds'
Size: 0 Blocks: 36028797018963968 IO Block: 1024 regular empty file
(This is a bug in squashfs or mksquashfs, but it shouldn't cause Nix
to fail.)
complete set of live and dead paths before starting the actual
deletion, but determines liveness on demand. I.e. for any path in
the store, it first tries to delete all the referrers, and then the
path itself. This means that the collector can start deleting paths
almost immediately.
(Linux) machines no longer maintain the atime because it's too
expensive, and on the machines where --use-atime is useful (like the
buildfarm), reading the atimes on the entire Nix store takes way too
much time to make it practical.
intersectAttrs returns the (right-biased) intersection between two
attribute sets, e.g. every attribute from the second set that also
exists in the first. functionArgs returns the set of attributes
expected by a function.
The main goal of these is to allow the elimination of most of
all-packages.nix. Most package instantiations in all-packages.nix
have this form:
foo = import ./foo.nix {
inherit a b c;
};
With intersectAttrs and functionArgs, this can be written as:
foo = callPackage (import ./foo.nix) { };
where
callPackage = f: args:
f ((builtins.intersectAttrs (builtins.functionArgs f) pkgs) // args);
I.e., foo.nix is called with all attributes from "pkgs" that it
actually needs (e.g., pkgs.a, pkgs.b and pkgs.c). (callPackage can
do any other generic package-level stuff we might want, such as
applying makeOverridable.) Of course, the automatically supplied
arguments can be overriden if needed, e.g.
foo = callPackage (import ./foo.nix) {
c = c_version_2;
};
but for the vast majority of packages, this won't be needed.
The advantages are to reduce the amount of typing needed to add a
dependency (from three sites to two), and to reduce the number of
trivial commits to all-packages.nix. For the former, there have
been two previous attempts:
- Use "args: with args;" in the package's function definition.
This however obscures the actual expected arguments of a
function, which is very bad.
- Use "{ arg1, arg2, ... }:" in the package's function definition
(i.e. use the ellipis "..." to allow arbitrary additional
arguments), and then call the function with all of "pkgs" as an
argument. But this inhibits error detection if you call it with
an misspelled (or obsolete) argument.
