This caused "nix-store --import" to compute an incorrect hash on NARs
that don't fit in an unsigned int. The import would succeed, but
"nix-store --verify-path" or subsequent exports would detect an
incorrect hash.
A deeper issue is that the export/import format does not contain a
hash, so we can't detect such issues early.
Also, I learned that -Wall does not warn about this.
So for instance "nix copy --to ... nixpkgs.hello" will build
nixpkgs.hello first. It's debatable whether this is a good idea. It
seems desirable for commands like "nix copy" but maybe not for
commands like "nix path-info".
Thus
$ nix build -f foo.nix
will build foo.nix.
And
$ nix build
will build default.nix. However, this may not be a good idea because
it's kind of inconsistent, given that "nix build foo" will build the
"foo" attribute from the default installation source (i.e. the
synthesis of $NIX_PATH), rather than ./default.nix. So I may revert
this.
This allows commands like 'nix path-info', 'nix copy', 'nix verify'
etc. to work on arbitrary installables. E.g. to copy geeqie to a
binary cache:
$ nix copy -r --to file:///tmp/binary-cache nixpkgs.geeqie
Or to get the closure size of thunderbird:
$ nix path-info -S nixpkgs.thunderbird
In particular, this disallows attribute names containing dots or
starting with dots. Hydra already disallowed these. This affects the
following packages in Nixpkgs master:
2048-in-terminal
2bwm
389-ds-base
90secondportraits
lispPackages.3bmd
lispPackages.hu.dwim.asdf
lispPackages.hu.dwim.def
Closes#1342.
The typical use is to inherit Config and add Setting<T> members:
class MyClass : private Config
{
Setting<int> foo{this, 123, "foo", "the number of foos to use"};
Setting<std::string> bar{this, "blabla", "bar", "the name of the bar"};
MyClass() : Config(readConfigFile("/etc/my-app.conf"))
{
std::cout << foo << "\n"; // will print 123 unless overriden
}
};
Currently, this is used by Store and its subclasses for store
parameters. You now get a warning if you specify a non-existant store
parameter in a store URI.
This provides a significant speedup, e.g. 64 s -> 12 s for
nix-build --dry-run -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-16.03 '<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
on a cold local and CloudFront cache.
The alternative is to use lots of concurrent daemon connections but
that seems wasteful.
This is useless because the client also caches path info, and can
cause problems for long-running clients like hydra-queue-runner
(i.e. it may return cached info about paths that have been
garbage-collected).
This fixes "No such file or directory" when opening /dev/ptmx
(e.g. http://hydra.nixos.org/build/51094249).
The reason appears to be some changes to /dev/ptmx / /dev/pts handling
between Linux 4.4 and 4.9. See
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/7832531/.
The fix is to go back to mounting a proper /dev/pts instance inside
the sandbox. Happily, this now works inside user namespaces, even for
unprivileged users. So
NIX_REMOTE=local?root=/tmp/nix nix-build \
'<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
works for non-root users.
The downside is that the fix breaks sandbox builds on older kernels
(probably pre-4.6), since mounting a devpts fails inside user
namespaces for some reason I've never been able to figure out. Builds
on those systems will fail with
error: while setting up the build environment: mounting /dev/pts: Invalid argument
Ah well.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.
There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:
* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching
Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.
The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).
So if "text-compression=br", the .ls file in S3 will get a
Content-Encoding of "br". Brotli appears to compress better than xz
for this kind of file and is natively supported by browsers.
You can now set the store parameter "text-compression=br" to compress
textual files in the binary cache (i.e. narinfo and logs) using
Brotli. This sets the Content-Encoding header; the extension of
compressed files is unchanged.
You can separately specify the compression of log files using
"log-compression=br". This is useful when you don't want to compress
narinfo files for backward compatibility.
Build logs on cache.nixos.org are compressed using Brotli (since this
allows them to be decompressed automatically by Chrome and Firefox),
so it's handy if "nix log" can decompress them.
This allows various Store implementations to provide different ways to
get build logs. For example, BinaryCacheStore can get the build logs
from the binary cache.
Also, remove the log-servers option since we can use substituters for
this.
* Unify SSH code in SSHStore and LegacySSHStore.
* Fix a race starting the SSH master. We now wait synchronously for
the SSH master to finish starting. This prevents the SSH clients
from starting their own connections.
* Don't use a master if max-connections == 1.
* Add a "max-connections" store parameter.
* Add a "compress" store parameter.
"build-max-jobs" and the "-j" option can now be set to "auto" to use
the number of CPUs in the system. (Unlike build-cores, it doesn't use
0 to imply auto-configuration, because a) magic values are a bad idea
in general; b) 0 is a legitimate value used to disable local
building.)
Fixes#1198.
Need to remember that std::map::insert() and emplace() don't overwrite
existing entries...
This fixes a regression relative to 1.11 that in particular triggers
in nested nix-shells.
Before:
$ nativeBuildInputs=/foo nix-shell -p hello --run 'hello'
build input /foo does not exist
After:
$ nativeBuildInputs=/foo nix-shell -p hello --run 'hello'
Hello, world!
Previously, the Settings class allowed other code to query for string
properties, which led to a proliferation of code all over the place making
up new options without any sort of central registry of valid options. This
commit pulls all those options back into the central Settings class and
removes the public get() methods, to discourage future abuses like that.
Furthermore, because we know the full set of options ahead of time, we
now fail loudly if someone enters an unrecognized option, thus preventing
subtle typos. With some template fun, we could probably also dump the full
set of options (with documentation, defaults, etc.) to the command line,
but I'm not doing that yet here.
... and use this in Downloader::downloadCached(). This fixes
$ nix-build https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.09-small/nixexprs.tar.xz -A hello
error: cannot import path ‘/nix/store/csfbp1s60dkgmk9f8g0zk0mwb7hzgabd-nixexprs.tar.xz’ because it lacks a valid signature
This allows <nix/fetchurl.nix> to fetch private Git/Mercurial
repositories, e.g.
import <nix/fetchurl.nix> {
url = https://edolstra@bitbucket.org/edolstra/my-private-repo/get/80a14018daed.tar.bz2;
sha256 = "1mgqzn7biqkq3hf2697b0jc4wabkqhmzq2srdymjfa6sb9zb6qs7";
}
where /etc/nix/netrc contains:
machine bitbucket.org
login edolstra
password blabla...
This works even when sandboxing is enabled.
To do: add unpacking support (i.e. fetchzip functionality).
Some sites (e.g. BitBucket) give a helpful 401 error when trying to
download a private archive if the User-Agent contains "curl", but give
a redirect to a login page otherwise (so for instance
"nix-prefetch-url" will succeed but produce useless output).
This adds support for s3:// URIs in all places where Nix allows URIs,
e.g. in builtins.fetchurl, builtins.fetchTarball, <nix/fetchurl.nix>
and NIX_PATH. It allows fetching resources from private S3 buckets,
using credentials obtained from the standard places (i.e. AWS_*
environment variables, ~/.aws/credentials and the EC2 metadata
server). This may not be super-useful in general, but since we already
depend on aws-sdk-cpp, it's a cheap feature to add.
Currently, 'nix-daemon --stdio' is always failing for me, due to the
splice call always failing with (on a 32-bit host):
splice(0, NULL, 3, NULL, 4294967295, SPLICE_F_MOVE) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
With a bit of ftracing (and luck) the problem seems to be that splice()
always fails with EINVAL if the len cast as ssize_t is negative:
http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/fs/read_write.c?v=4.4#L384
So use SSIZE_MAX instead of SIZE_MAX.
Because config.h can #define things like _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 and not
every compilation unit includes config.h, we currently compile half of
Nix with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 and other half with _FILE_OFFSET_BITS
unset. This causes major havoc with the Settings class on e.g. 32-bit ARM,
where different compilation units disagree with the struct layout.
E.g.:
diff --git a/src/libstore/globals.cc b/src/libstore/globals.cc
@@ -166,6 +166,8 @@ void Settings::update()
_get(useSubstitutes, "build-use-substitutes");
+ fprintf(stderr, "at Settings::update(): &useSubstitutes = %p\n", &nix::settings.useSubstitutes);
_get(buildUsersGroup, "build-users-group");
diff --git a/src/libstore/remote-store.cc b/src/libstore/remote-store.cc
+++ b/src/libstore/remote-store.cc
@@ -138,6 +138,8 @@ void RemoteStore::initConnection(Connection & conn)
void RemoteStore::setOptions(Connection & conn)
{
+ fprintf(stderr, "at RemoteStore::setOptions(): &useSubstitutes = %p\n", &nix::settings.useSubstitutes);
conn.to << wopSetOptions
Gave me:
at Settings::update(): &useSubstitutes = 0xb6e5c5cb
at RemoteStore::setOptions(): &useSubstitutes = 0xb6e5c5c7
That was not a fun one to debug!
This writes info about every path in the closure in the same format as
‘nix path-info --json’. Thus it also includes NAR hashes and sizes.
Example:
[
{
"path": "/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"narHash": "sha256:0ckdc4z20kkmpqdilx0wl6cricxv90lh85xpv2qljppcmz6vzcxl",
"narSize": 197648,
"references": [
"/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24"
],
"closureSize": 20939776
},
{
"path": "/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24",
"narHash": "sha256:1nfn3m3p98y1c0kd0brp80dn9n5mycwgrk183j17rajya0h7gax3",
"narSize": 20742128,
"references": [
"/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24"
],
"closureSize": 20742128
}
]
Fixes#1134.
Previously, all derivation attributes had to be coerced into strings
so that they could be passed via the environment. This is lossy
(e.g. lists get flattened, necessitating configureFlags
vs. configureFlagsArray, of which the latter cannot be specified as an
attribute), doesn't support attribute sets at all, and has size
limitations (necessitating hacks like passAsFile).
This patch adds a new mode for passing attributes to builders, namely
encoded as a JSON file ".attrs.json" in the current directory of the
builder. This mode is activated via the special attribute
__structuredAttrs = true;
(The idea is that one day we can set this in stdenv.mkDerivation.)
For example,
stdenv.mkDerivation {
__structuredAttrs = true;
name = "foo";
buildInputs = [ pkgs.hello pkgs.cowsay ];
doCheck = true;
hardening.format = false;
}
results in a ".attrs.json" file containing (sans the indentation):
{
"buildInputs": [],
"builder": "/nix/store/ygl61ycpr2vjqrx775l1r2mw1g2rb754-bash-4.3-p48/bin/bash",
"configureFlags": [
"--with-foo",
"--with-bar=1 2"
],
"doCheck": true,
"hardening": {
"format": false
},
"name": "foo",
"nativeBuildInputs": [
"/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"/nix/store/4jnvjin0r6wp6cv1hdm5jbkx3vinlcvk-cowsay-3.03"
],
"propagatedBuildInputs": [],
"propagatedNativeBuildInputs": [],
"stdenv": "/nix/store/f3hw3p8armnzy6xhd4h8s7anfjrs15n2-stdenv",
"system": "x86_64-linux"
}
"passAsFile" is ignored in this mode because it's not needed - large
strings are included directly in the JSON representation.
It is up to the builder to do something with the JSON
representation. For example, in bash-based builders, lists/attrsets of
string values could be mapped to bash (associative) arrays.
This closes a long-time bug that allowed builds to hang Nix
indefinitely (regardless of timeouts) simply by doing
exec > /dev/null 2>&1; while true; do true; done
Now, on EOF, we just send SIGKILL to the child to make sure it's
really gone.
This allows other threads to install callbacks that run in a regular,
non-signal context. In particular, we can use this to signal the
downloader thread to quit.
Closes#1183.
Regression from a5f2750e ("Fix early removal of rc-file for nix-shell").
The removal of BASH_ENV causes nothing to be executed by bash if it
detects itself in a non-interactive context. Instead, just
use the same condition used by bash to launch bash differently.
According to bash sources, the condition (stdin and stder both
must be TTYs) is specified by POSIX so this should be pretty
safe to rely on.
Fixes#1171 on master, needs a backport to the Perl code in 1.11.
I had observed that 'bash --rcfile' would do nothing in a
non-interactive context and cause nothing to be executed if a script
using nix-shell shebangs were run in a non-interactive context.
The 'args' variable here is shadowing one in the outer scope and its
contents end up unused. This causes any '#! nix-shell' lines to
effectively be ignored. The intention here was to clear the args vector,
as far as I can tell (and it seems to work).
It failed with
AWS error uploading ‘6gaxphsyhg66mz0a00qghf9nqf7majs2.ls.xz’: Unable to parse ExceptionName: MissingContentLength Message: You must provide the Content-Length HTTP header.
possibly because the istringstream_nocopy introduced in
0d2ebb4373 doesn't supply the seek
method that the AWS library expects. So bring back the old version,
but only for S3BinaryCacheStore.
That is, when build-repeat > 0, and the output of two rounds differ,
then print a warning rather than fail the build. This is primarily to
let Hydra check reproducibility of all packages.
These syscalls are only available in 32bit architectures, but libseccomp
should handle them correctly even if we're on native architectures that
do not have these syscalls.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Commands such as "cp -p" also use fsetxattr() in addition to fchown(),
so we need to make sure these syscalls always return successful as well
in order to avoid nasty "Invalid value" errors.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
What we basically want is a seccomp mode 2 BPF program like this but for
every architecture:
BPF_STMT(BPF_LD+BPF_W+BPF_ABS, offsetof(struct seccomp_data, nr)),
BPF_JUMP(BPF_JMP+BPF_JEQ+BPF_K, __NR_chown, 4, 0),
BPF_JUMP(BPF_JMP+BPF_JEQ+BPF_K, __NR_fchown, 3, 0),
BPF_JUMP(BPF_JMP+BPF_JEQ+BPF_K, __NR_fchownat, 2, 0),
BPF_JUMP(BPF_JMP+BPF_JEQ+BPF_K, __NR_lchown, 1, 0),
BPF_STMT(BPF_RET+BPF_K, SECCOMP_RET_ALLOW),
BPF_STMT(BPF_RET+BPF_K, SECCOMP_RET_ERRNO)
However, on 32 bit architectures we do have chown32, lchown32 and
fchown32, so we'd need to add all the architecture blurb which
libseccomp handles for us.
So we only need to make sure that we add the 32bit seccomp arch while
we're on x86_64 and otherwise we just stay at the native architecture
which was set during seccomp_init(), which more or less replicates
setting 32bit personality during runChild().
The FORCE_SUCCESS() macro here could be a bit less ugly but I think
repeating the seccomp_rule_add() all over the place is way uglier.
Another way would have been to create a vector of syscalls to iterate
over, but that would make error messages uglier because we can either
only print the (libseccomp-internal) syscall number or use
seccomp_syscall_resolve_num_arch() to get the name or even make the
vector a pair number/name, essentially duplicating everything again.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
We're going to use libseccomp instead of creating the raw BPF program,
because we have different syscall numbers on different architectures.
Although our initial seccomp rules will be quite small it really doesn't
make sense to generate the raw BPF program because we need to duplicate
it and/or make branches on every single architecture we want to suuport.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
This reverts commit ff0c0b645c.
We're going to use seccomp to allow "cp -p" and force chown-related
syscalls to always return 0.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
This solves a problem whereby if /gnu/store/.links had enough entries,
ext4's directory index would be full, leading to link(2) returning
ENOSPC.
* nix/libstore/optimise-store.cc (LocalStore::optimisePath_): Upon
ENOSPC from link(2), print a message and return instead of throwing a
'SysError'.
The SSHStore PR adds this functionality to the daemon, but we have to
handle the case where the Nix daemon is 1.11.
Also, don't require signatures for trusted users. This restores 1.11
behaviour.
Fixes https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/398.
For example, you can now set
build-sandbox-paths = /dev/nvidiactl?
to specify that /dev/nvidiactl should only be mounted in the sandbox
if it exists in the host filesystem. This is useful e.g. for EC2
images that should support both CUDA and non-CUDA instances.
On some architectures (like x86_64 or i686, but not ARM for example)
overflow during integer division causes a crash due to SIGFPE.
Reproduces on a 64-bit system with:
nix-instantiate --eval -E '(-9223372036854775807 - 1) / -1'
The only way this can happen is when the smallest possible integer is
divided by -1, so just special-case that.
The removal of CachedFailure caused the value of TimedOut to change,
which broke timed-out handling in Hydra (so timed-out builds would
show up as "aborted" and would be retried, e.g. at
http://hydra.nixos.org/build/42537427).
The store parameter "write-nar-listing=1" will cause BinaryCacheStore
to write a file ‘<store-hash>.ls.xz’ for each ‘<store-hash>.narinfo’
added to the binary cache. This file contains an XZ-compressed JSON
file describing the contents of the NAR, excluding the contents of
regular files.
E.g.
{
"version": 1,
"root": {
"type": "directory",
"entries": {
"lib": {
"type": "directory",
"entries": {
"Mcrt1.o": {
"type": "regular",
"size": 1288
},
"Scrt1.o": {
"type": "regular",
"size": 3920
},
}
}
}
...
}
}
(The actual file has no indentation.)
This is intended to speed up the NixOS channels programs index
generator [1], since fetching gazillions of large NARs from
cache.nixos.org is currently a bottleneck for updating the regular
(non-small) channel.
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-channel-scripts/blob/master/generate-programs-index.cc
We can now write
throw Error("file '%s' not found", path);
instead of
throw Error(format("file '%s' not found") % path);
and similarly
printError("file '%s' not found", path);
instead of
printMsg(lvlError, format("file '%s' not found") % path);
We were passing "p=$PATH" rather than "p=$PATH;", resulting in some
invalid shell code.
Also, construct a separate environment for the child rather than
overwriting the parent's.
The fact that queryPathInfo() is synchronous meant that we needed a
thread for every concurrent binary cache lookup, even though they end
up being handled by the same download thread. Requiring hundreds of
threads is not a good idea. So now there is an asynchronous version of
queryPathInfo() that takes a callback function to process the
result. Similarly, enqueueDownload() now takes a callback rather than
returning a future.
Thus, a command like
nix path-info --store https://cache.nixos.org/ -r /nix/store/slljrzwmpygy1daay14kjszsr9xix063-nixos-16.09beta231.dccf8c5
that returns 4941 paths now takes 1.87s using only 2 threads (the main
thread and the downloader thread). (This is with a prewarmed
CloudFront.)
It's a slight misnomer now because it actually limits *all* downloads,
not just binary cache lookups.
Also add a "enable-http2" option to allow disabling use of HTTP/2
(enabled by default).
The binary cache store can now use HTTP/2 to do lookups. This is much
more efficient than HTTP/1.1 due to multiplexing: we can issue many
requests in parallel over a single TCP connection. Thus it's no longer
necessary to use a bunch of concurrent TCP connections (25 by
default).
For example, downloading 802 .narinfo files from
https://cache.nixos.org/, using a single TCP connection, takes 11.8s
with HTTP/1.1, but only 0.61s with HTTP/2.
This did require a fairly substantial rewrite of the Downloader class
to use the curl multi interface, because otherwise curl wouldn't be
able to do multiplexing for us. As a bonus, we get connection reuse
even with HTTP/1.1. All downloads are now handled by a single worker
thread. Clients call Downloader::enqueueDownload() to tell the worker
thread to start the download, getting a std::future to the result.
This largely reverts c68e5913c7. Running
builds as root breaks "cp -p", since when running as root, "cp -p"
assumes that it can succesfully chown() files. But that's not actually
the case since the user namespace doesn't provide a complete uid
mapping. So it barfs with a fatal error message ("cp: failed to
preserve ownership for 'foo': Invalid argument").
BASH_ENV causes all non-interactive shells called via eg. /etc/bashrc to
remove the rc-file before the main shell gets to run it. Completion
scripts will often do this. Fixes#976.
Adapted from and fixes#1034.
This fixes an assertion failure in "assert(goal);" in
Worker::waitForInput() after a substitution goal is cancelled by the
termination of another goal. The problem was the line
//worker.childTerminated(shared_from_this()); // FIXME
in the SubstitutionGoal destructor. This was disabled because
shared_from_this() obviously doesn't work from a destructor. So we now
use a real pointer for object identity.
The implementation of "partition" in Nixpkgs is O(n^2) (because of the
use of ++), and for some reason was causing stack overflows in
multi-threaded evaluation (not sure why).
This reduces "nix-env -qa --drv-path" runtime by 0.197s and memory
usage by 298 MiB (in non-Boehm mode).
Normally it's impossible to take a reference to the function passed to
callFunction, so some callers (e.g. ExprApp::eval) allocate that value
on the stack. For functors, a reference to the functor itself may be
kept, so we need to have it on the heap.
Fixes#1045
The inner lambda was returning a SQLite-internal char * rather than a
std::string, leading to Hydra errors liks
Caught exception in Hydra::Controller::Root->narinfo "path âø£â is not in the Nix store at /nix/store/6mvvyb8fgwj23miyal5mdr8ik4ixk15w-hydra-0.1.1234.abcdef/libexec/hydra/lib/Hydra/Controller/Root.pm line 352."
That is, unless --file is specified, the Nix search path is
synthesized into an attribute set. Thus you can say
$ nix build nixpkgs.hello
assuming $NIX_PATH contains an entry of the form "nixpkgs=...". This
is more verbose than
$ nix build hello
but is less ambiguous.
For example, you can now say:
configureFlags = "--prefix=${placeholder "out"} --includedir=${placeholder "dev"}";
The strings returned by the ‘placeholder’ builtin are replaced at
build time by the actual store paths corresponding to the specified
outputs.
Previously, you had to work around the inability to self-reference by doing stuff like:
preConfigure = ''
configureFlags+=" --prefix $out --includedir=$dev"
'';
or rely on ad-hoc variable interpolation semantics in Autoconf or Make
(e.g. --prefix=\$(out)), which doesn't always work.
This makes it easier to create a diverted store, i.e.
NIX_REMOTE="local?root=/tmp/root"
instead of
NIX_REMOTE="local?real=/tmp/root/nix/store&state=/tmp/root/nix/var/nix" NIX_LOG_DIR=/tmp/root/nix/var/log
This fixes instantiation of pythonPackages.pytest that produces a
directory with less permissions during one of it's tests that leads to
a nix error like:
error: opening directory ‘/tmp/nix-build-python2.7-pytest-2.9.2.drv-0/pytest-of-user/pytest-0/testdir/test_cache_failure_warns0/.cache’: Permission denied
For one particular NixOS configuration, this cut the runtime of
"nix-store -r --dry-run" from 6m51s to 3.4s. It also fixes a bug in
the size calculation that was causing certain paths to be counted
twice, e.g. before:
these paths will be fetched (1249.98 MiB download, 2995.74 MiB unpacked):
and after:
these paths will be fetched (1219.56 MiB download, 2862.17 MiB unpacked):
This way, all builds appear to have a uid/gid of 0 inside the
chroot. In the future, this may allow using programs like
systemd-nspawn inside builds, but that will require assigning a larger
UID/GID map to the build.
Issue #625.
This allows an unprivileged user to perform builds on a diverted store
(i.e. where the physical store location differs from the logical
location).
Example:
$ NIX_LOG_DIR=/tmp/log NIX_REMOTE="local?real=/tmp/store&state=/tmp/var" nix-build -E \
'with import <nixpkgs> {}; runCommand "foo" { buildInputs = [procps nettools]; } "id; ps; ifconfig; echo $out > $out"'
will do a build in the Nix store physically in /tmp/store but
logically in /nix/store (and thus using substituters for the latter).
This is a convenience command to allow users who are not privileged to
create /nix/store to use Nix with regular binary caches. For example,
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=$HOME/nix/var&real=/$HOME/nix/store" nix run firefox bashInteractive
will download Firefox and bash from cache.nixos.org, then start a
shell in which $HOME/nix/store is mounted on /nix/store.
