Channels can now advertise a binary cache by creating a file
<channel-url>/binary-cache-url. The channel unpacker puts these in
its "binary-caches" subdirectory. Thus, the URLS of the binary caches
for the channels added by root appear in
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/eelco/channels/binary-caches/*. The
binary cache substituter reads these and adds them to the list of
binary caches.
Channels are implemented using a profile now, and profiles contain a
manifest.nix file. This should be ignored to prevent bogus packages
from showing up in nix-env.
The .nixpkg file format is extended to optionally include the URL of a
binary cache, which will be used in preference to the manifest URL
(which can be set to a non-existent value).
Querying all substitutable paths via "nix-env -qas" is potentially
hard on a server, since it involves sending thousands of HEAD
requests. So a binary cache must now have a meta-info file named
"nix-cache-info" that specifies whether the server wants this. It
also specifies the store prefix so that we don't send useless queries
to a binary cache for a different store prefix.
Since SubstitutionGoal::finished() in build.cc computes the hash
anyway, we can prevent the inefficiency of computing the hash twice by
letting the substituter tell Nix about the expected hash, which can
then verify it.
Commit 6a214f3e06 reused the NixOS
environment initialisation for nix-profile.sh, but this is
inappropriate on systems that don't have multi-user support enabled.
The generated attrset has drvPath and outPath with the right string context, type 'derivation', outputName with
the right name, all with a list of outputs, and an attribute for each output.
I see three uses for this (though certainly there may be more):
* Using derivations generated by something besides nix-instantiate (e.g. guix)
* Allowing packages provided by channels to be used in nix expressions. If a channel installed a valid deriver
for each package it provides into the store, then those could be imported and used as dependencies or installed
in environment.systemPackages, for example.
* Enable hydra to be consistent in how it treats inputs that are outputs of another build. Right now, if an
input is passed as an argument to the job, it is passed as a derivation, but if it is accessed via NIX_PATH
(i.e. through the <> syntax), then it is a path that can be imported. This is problematic because the build
being depended upon may have been built with non-obvious arguments passed to its jobset file. With this
feature, hydra can just set the name of that input to the path to its drv file in NIX_PATH
