Since we now chmod /nix/store at install time, we don't need to do it in the
post install script. We still chgrp in the post-install, because the nixbld
group doesn't exist at install time.
The Nix download page only mentions the .xz source tarball, so that's what
people are likely to have available. This means that somebody who downloads a
Nix source tarball can turn it directly into an RPM with `rpmbuild -ta
nix-*.tar.xz`.
Nix expects build users to be in the "nixbld" group. You can change that in the
config file, but `nix.spec` does not ship with a config file, so we should
use the defaults.
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.
This is primarily to subsume the functionality of the
copy-from-other-stores substituter. For example, in the NixOS
installer, we can now do (assuming we're in the target chroot, and the
Nix store of the installation CD is bind-mounted on /tmp/nix):
$ nix-build ... --option substituters 'local?state=/tmp/nix/var&real=/tmp/nix/store'
However, unlike copy-from-other-stores, this also allows write access
to such a store. One application might be fetching substitutes for
/nix/store in a situation where the user doesn't have sufficient
privileges to create /nix, e.g.:
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=/home/alice/nix/var&real=/home/alice/nix/store" nix-build ...
