This makes it consistent with the Nixpkgs fetchurl and makes it work
in chroots. We don't need verification because the hash of the result
is checked anyway.
The stack allocated for the builder was way too small (32 KB). This is
sufficient for normal derivations, because they just do some setup and
then exec() the actual builder. But for the fetchurl builtin
derivation it's not enough. Also, allocating the stack on the caller's
stack was fishy business.
This allows overriding the name component of the resulting Nix store
path, which is necessary if the base name of the URI contains
"illegal" characters.
This is in particular useful for fetchFromGitHub et al., ensuring that
the store path produced by nix-prefetch-url corresponds to what those
functions expect.
This allows nix-prefetch-url to prefetch the output of fetchzip and
its wrappers (like fetchFromGitHub). For example:
$ nix-prefetch-url --unpack https://github.com/NixOS/patchelf/archive/0.8.tar.gz
or from a Nix expression:
$ nix-prefetch-url -A nix-repl.src
In the latter case, --unpack can be omitted because nix-repl.src is a
fetchFromGitHub derivation and thus has "outputHashMode" set to
"recursive".
For example,
$ nix-prefetch-url -A hello.src
will prefetch the file specified by the fetchurl call in the attribute
‘hello.src’ from the Nix expression in the current directory. This
differs from ‘nix-build -A hello.src’ in that it doesn't verify the
hash.
You can also specify a path to the Nix expression:
$ nix-prefetch-url ~/Dev/nixpkgs -A hello.src
List elements (typically used in ‘patches’ attributes) also work:
$ nix-prefetch-url -A portmidi.patches.0
This makes that option even more insecure, by also not checking the SSL host.
But without this parameter, one can still get SSL errors even when
"verify-https-binary-caches" is false, which is unexpected IMO.
It was strange to show "upgrading" when the version was getting lower.
This is left on "upgrading" when the versions are the same,
as I can't see any better wording.