packages and configurations are not really a concept in Nix or the Nix language. the idea of transforming files into other files clearly captures what it's all about, and the new phrasing should make the term "derivation" more obvious both in terms of meaning and origin.
The primop `builtins.replaceStrings` currently always strictly evaluates the
replacement strings, however time and space are wasted for their computation
if the corresponding pattern do not occur in the input string. This commit
makes the evaluation of the replacement strings lazy by deferring their
evaluation to when the corresponding pattern are matched and memoize the result
for efficient retrieval on subsequent matches.
The testcases for replaceStrings was updated to check for lazy evaluation
of the replacements. A note was also added in the release notes to
document the behavior change.
it's more likely for readers to find it right there.
this also slightly rewords examples to make them stand out better.
in the long run there probably needs to be a dedicated section on formal syntax, and better highlighting of examples.
e.g. nix-env -e subversion => nix-env --uninstall subversion
The aim is to make the documentation less cryptic for newcomers and the
long options are more self-documenting.
The change was made with the following script:
<https://github.com/aschmolck/convert-short-nix-opts-to-long-ones>
and sanity checked visually.
This gives some more context and should clarify why it works that way.
Also link it from the section on `NIX_USER_CONF_FILES`.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
`/etc/bash.bashrc` is backed up as `/etc/bash.bashrc.backup-before-nix`,
but since other changes might have been introduced in the meantime we can't
just tell the user to revert.
add anchor to `builtins.derivation` and list some built-in functions that are
exposed in the global scope.
I decided not to list everything, because we probably don't want to
encourage people using them that way.
* doc rendering: add functions to scope explicitly
this especially helps beginners with code readability, since the origin
of names is always immediately visible.
it's probably better not to show the manifest file documentation in the
command-specific pages, because these are implementation details that are not really practically useful.
this means no additional hassle for building the manual, but clutters
the table of contents a bit.
placed in a subsection of the binary install, the instructions are hard
to find. putting them in a separate page that is shown in the table of
contents should make it easier for users to find what they need when
they need it.
