In particular, doing 'nix build /path/to/dir' now works if
/path/to/dir is not a Git tree (it only has to contain a flake.nix
file).
Also, 'nix flake init' no longer requires a Git tree (but it will do a
'git add flake.nix' if it's a Git tree)
Future editions of flakes or the Nix language can be supported by
renaming flake.nix (e.g. flake-v2.nix). This avoids a bootstrap
problem where we don't know which grammar to use to parse
flake*.nix. It also allows a project to support multiple flake
editions, in theory.
This provides a pluggable mechanism for defining new fetchers. It adds
a builtin function 'fetchTree' that generalizes existing fetchers like
'fetchGit', 'fetchMercurial' and 'fetchTarball'. 'fetchTree' takes a
set of attributes, e.g.
fetchTree {
type = "git";
url = "https://example.org/repo.git";
ref = "some-branch";
rev = "abcdef...";
}
The existing fetchers are just wrappers around this. Note that the
input attributes to fetchTree are the same as flake input
specifications and flake lock file entries.
All fetchers share a common cache stored in
~/.cache/nix/fetcher-cache-v1.sqlite. This replaces the ad hoc caching
mechanisms in fetchGit and download.cc (e.g. ~/.cache/nix/{tarballs,git-revs*}).
This also adds support for Git worktrees (c169ea5904).
This is useful for finding out what a registry lookup resolves to, e.g
$ nix flake info patchelf
Resolved URL: github:NixOS/patchelf
Locked URL: github:NixOS/patchelf/cd7955af31698c571c30b7a0f78e59fd624d0229
When we do something like 'nix flake update --override-input nixpkgs
...', the override is now kept on subsequent calls. (If you don't want
this behaviour, you can use --no-write-lock-file.)
This allows querying the location of function arguments. E.g.
builtins.unsafeGetAttrPos "x" (builtins.functionArgs ({ x }: null))
=> { column = 57; file = "/home/infinisil/src/nix/inst/test.nix"; line = 1; }
Maximilian Bosch