When running NixOps under Mac OS X, we need to be able to import store
paths built on Linux into the local Nix store. However, HFS+ is
usually case-insensitive, so if there are directories with file names
that differ only in case, then importing will fail.
The solution is to add a suffix ("~nix~case~hack~<integer>") to
colliding files. For instance, if we have a directory containing
xt_CONNMARK.h and xt_connmark.h, then the latter will be renamed to
"xt_connmark.h~nix~case~hack~1". If a store path is dumped as a NAR,
the suffixes are removed. Thus, importing and exporting via a
case-insensitive Nix store is round-tripping. So when NixOps calls
nix-copy-closure to copy the path to a Linux machine, you get the
original file names back.
Closes#119.
This makes things more efficient (we don't need to use an SSH master
connection, and we only start a single remote process) and gets rid of
locking issues (the remote nix-store process will keep inputs and
outputs locked as long as they're needed).
It also makes it more or less secure to connect directly to the root
account on the build machine, using a forced command
(e.g. ‘command="nix-store --serve --write"’). This bypasses the Nix
daemon and is therefore more efficient.
Also, don't call nix-store to import the output paths.
There is a long-standing race condition when copying a closure to a
remote machine, particularly affecting build-remote.pl: the client
first asks the remote machine which paths it already has, then copies
over the missing paths. If the garbage collector kicks in on the
remote machine between the first and second step, the already-present
paths may be deleted. The missing paths may then refer to deleted
paths, causing nix-copy-closure to fail. The client now performs both
steps using a single remote Nix call (using ‘nix-store --serve’),
locking all paths in the closure while querying.
I changed the --serve protocol a bit (getting rid of QueryCommand), so
this breaks the SSH substituter from older versions. But it was marked
experimental anyway.
Fixes#141.
This can be used to import a dynamic shared object and return an
arbitrary value, including new primops. This can be used both to test
new primops without having to recompile nix every time, and to build
specialized primops that probably don't belong upstream (e.g. a function
that calls out to gpg to decrypt a nixops secret as-needed).
The imported function should initialize the Value & as needed. A single
import can define multiple values by creating an attrset or list, of
course.
An example initialization function might look like:
extern "C" void initialize(nix::EvalState & state, nix::Value & v)
{
v.type = nix::tPrimOp;
v.primOp = NEW nix::PrimOp(myFun, 1, state.symbols.create("myFun"));
}
Then `builtins.importNative ./example.so "initialize"` will evaluate to
the primop defined in the myFun function.
When copying a large path causes the daemon to run out of memory, you
now get:
error: Nix daemon out of memory
instead of:
error: writing to file: Broken pipe
It's slower than ExprVar since it doesn't compute a static
displacement. Since we're not using the throw primop in the
implementation of <...> anymore, it's also not really needed.
Nix search path lookups like <nixpkgs> are now desugared to ‘findFile
nixPath <nixpkgs>’, where ‘findFile’ is a new primop. Thus you can
override the search path simply by saying
let
nixPath = [ { prefix = "nixpkgs"; path = "/my-nixpkgs"; } ];
in ... <nixpkgs> ...
In conjunction with ‘scopedImport’ (commit
c273c15cb1), the Nix search path can be
propagated across imports, e.g.
let
overrides = {
nixPath = [ ... ] ++ builtins.nixPath;
import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;
scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;
builtins = builtins // overrides;
};
in scopedImport overrides ./nixos
‘scopedImport’ works like ‘import’, except that it takes a set of
attributes to be added to the lexical scope of the expression,
essentially extending or overriding the builtin variables. For
instance, the expression
scopedImport { x = 1; } ./foo.nix
where foo.nix contains ‘x’, will evaluate to 1.
This has a few applications:
* It allows getting rid of function argument specifications in package
expressions. For instance, a package expression like:
{ stdenv, fetchurl, libfoo }:
stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }
can now we written as just
stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }
and imported in all-packages.nix as:
bar = scopedImport pkgs ./bar.nix;
So whereas we once had dependencies listed in three places
(buildInputs, the function, and the call site), they now only need
to appear in one place.
* It allows overriding builtin functions. For instance, to trace all
calls to ‘map’:
let
overrides = {
map = f: xs: builtins.trace "map called!" (map f xs);
# Ensure that our override gets propagated by calls to
# import/scopedImport.
import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;
scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;
# Also update ‘builtins’.
builtins = builtins // overrides;
};
in scopedImport overrides ./bla.nix
* Similarly, it allows extending the set of builtin functions. For
instance, during Nixpkgs/NixOS evaluation, the Nixpkgs library
functions could be added to the default scope.
There is a downside: calls to scopedImport are not memoized, unlike
import. So importing a file multiple times leads to multiple parsings
/ evaluations. It would be possible to construct the AST only once,
but that would require careful handling of variables/environments.
If a build log is not available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now
try to download it from the servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option
in nix.conf. For instance, if you have:
log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log
then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/<base
name of the store path>. So you can do things like:
$ nix-store -l $(which xterm)
and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.
