Emacs 24.1 introduced the notion of "basic major modes" and among these
is prog-mode, see section "23.2.5 Basic Major Modes" in the Emacs
manual. The prog-mode basic major mode is recommended as a base for
derived major modes that are intended for editing source code.
- Use define-derived-mode to declare nix-mode
- Use autoloads to ensure nix-mode is usable (and enabled) without needing `require`
- Use set + make-local-variable instead of longer 2-step equivalent
In Nixpkgs, the attribute in all-packages.nix corresponding to a
package is usually equal to the package name. However, this doesn't
work if the package contains a dash, which is fairly common. The
convention is to replace the dash with an underscore (e.g. "dbus-lib"
becomes "dbus_glib"), but that's annoying. So now dashes are valid in
variable / attribute names, allowing you to write:
dbus-glib = callPackage ../development/libraries/dbus-glib { };
and
buildInputs = [ dbus-glib ];
Since we don't have a negation or subtraction operation in Nix, this
is unambiguous.
much as possible. (This is similar to GNU Make's `-k' flag.)
* Refactoring to implement this: previously we just bombed out when
a build failed, but now we have to clean up. In particular this
means that goals must be freed quickly --- they shouldn't hang
around until the worker exits. So the worker now maintains weak
pointers in order not to prevent garbage collection.
* Documented the `-k' and `-j' flags.