the term was hard to discover, as its definition and explanation were in
a very long document lacking an overview section.
search did not help because it occurs so often.
- clarify wording in the definition
- add an overview of installable types
- add "installable" to glossary
- link to definition from occurrences of the term
- be more precise about where store derivation outputs are processed
- installable Nix expressions must evaluate to a derivation
Co-authored-by: Adam Joseph <54836058+amjoseph-nixpkgs@users.noreply.github.com>
Presently when nix says something like:
```
these 486 paths will be fetched (511.54 MiB download, 6458.64 MiB unpacked):
...path1
...path2
...path3
...
...
...path486
```
It sorts path1, path2, path3, ..., path486 in lexicographic order of the
store path.
After this commit, nix will show path1, path2, path3, ..., path486 sorted by
StorePath name() (basically everything after the hash) rather than the store path.
This makes it easier to review what exactly is being downloaded at a glance,
especially when many paths need to be fetched.
We make sure the env var paths are actually set (ie. not "") before
sending them to the canonicalization function. If we forget to do so,
the user will end up facing a puzzled failed assertion internal error.
We issue a non-failing warning as a stop-gap measure. We could want to
revisit this to issue a detailed failing error message in the future.
Currently the valid key is only present when the path is invalid, which
makes checking path validity more complex than it should be. With this
change, the valid key can always be used to check if a path is valid
The release notes document the change in behavior, I don't include it
here so there is no risk to it getting out of sync.
> Motivation
>> Plumbing CLI should be simple
Store derivation installations are intended as "plumbing": very simple
utilities for advanced users and scripts, and not what regular users
interact with. (Similarly, regular Git users will use branch and tag
names not explicit hashes for most things.)
The plumbing CLI should prize simplicity over convenience; that is its
raison d'etre. If the user provides a path, we should treat it the same
way not caring what sort of path it is.
>> Scripting
This is especially important for the scripting use-case. when arbitrary
paths are sent to e.g. `nix copy` and the script author wants consistent
behavior regardless of what those store paths are. Otherwise the script
author needs to be careful to filter out `.drv` ones, and then run `nix
copy` again with those paths and `--derivation`. That is not good!
>> Surprisingly low impact
Only two lines in the tests need changing, showing that the impact of
this is pretty light.
Many command, like `nix log` will continue to work with just the
derivation passed as before. This because we used to:
- Special case the drv path and replace it with it's outputs (what this
gets rid of).
- Turn those output path *back* into the original drv path.
Now we just skip that entire round trip!
> Context
Issue #7261 lays out a broader vision for getting rid of `--derivation`,
and has this as one of its dependencies. But we can do this with or
without that.
`Installable::toDerivations` is changed to handle the case of a
`DerivedPath::Opaque` ending in `.drv`, which is new: it simply doesn't
need to do any extra work in that case. On this basis, commands like
`nix {show-derivation,log} /nix/store/...-foo.drv` still work as before,
as described above.
When testing older daemons, the post-build-hook will be run against the
old CLI, so we need the old version of the post-build-hook to support
that use-case.
Co-authored-by: Travis A. Everett <travis.a.everett@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
Resolves#7437 for new `nix` commands only by adding a `--stdin` flag.
If paths are also passed on the cli they will be combined with the ones
from standard input.
Whenever a file conflict happens during "nix profile install" an error
is shown that was previously thrown inside builtins.buildEnv.
We catch BuildProfileConflictError here so that we can provide the user
with more useful instructions on what to do next.
Most notably, we give the user concrete commands to use with all
parameters already filled in. This avoids the need for the user to look
up these commands in manual pages.
At the moment an Error is thrown that only holds an error message
regarding `nix-env` and `nix profile`. These tools make use of
builtins.buildEnv, but buildEnv is also used in other places. These
places are unrelated to Nix profiles, so the error shouldn't mention
these tools.
This generic error is now BuildEnvFileConflictError, which holds more
contextual information about the files that were conflicting while
building the environment.
Yorick
Jonas Chevalier
Bob van der Linden