So for instance "nix copy --to ... nixpkgs.hello" will build
nixpkgs.hello first. It's debatable whether this is a good idea. It
seems desirable for commands like "nix copy" but maybe not for
commands like "nix path-info".
Thus
$ nix build -f foo.nix
will build foo.nix.
And
$ nix build
will build default.nix. However, this may not be a good idea because
it's kind of inconsistent, given that "nix build foo" will build the
"foo" attribute from the default installation source (i.e. the
synthesis of $NIX_PATH), rather than ./default.nix. So I may revert
this.
This allows commands like 'nix path-info', 'nix copy', 'nix verify'
etc. to work on arbitrary installables. E.g. to copy geeqie to a
binary cache:
$ nix copy -r --to file:///tmp/binary-cache nixpkgs.geeqie
Or to get the closure size of thunderbird:
$ nix path-info -S nixpkgs.thunderbird
This writes info about every path in the closure in the same format as
‘nix path-info --json’. Thus it also includes NAR hashes and sizes.
Example:
[
{
"path": "/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"narHash": "sha256:0ckdc4z20kkmpqdilx0wl6cricxv90lh85xpv2qljppcmz6vzcxl",
"narSize": 197648,
"references": [
"/nix/store/10h6li26i7g6z3mdpvra09yyf10mmzdr-hello-2.10",
"/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24"
],
"closureSize": 20939776
},
{
"path": "/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24",
"narHash": "sha256:1nfn3m3p98y1c0kd0brp80dn9n5mycwgrk183j17rajya0h7gax3",
"narSize": 20742128,
"references": [
"/nix/store/27binbdy296qvjycdgr1535v8872vz3z-glibc-2.24"
],
"closureSize": 20742128
}
]
Fixes#1134.
That is, unless --file is specified, the Nix search path is
synthesized into an attribute set. Thus you can say
$ nix build nixpkgs.hello
assuming $NIX_PATH contains an entry of the form "nixpkgs=...". This
is more verbose than
$ nix build hello
but is less ambiguous.
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 replaces nix-push. For example,
$ nix copy --to file:///tmp/cache -r $(type -p firefox)
copies the closure of firefox to the specified binary cache. And
$ nix copy --from file:///tmp/cache --to s3://my-cache /nix/store/abcd...
copies between two binary caches.
It will also replace nix-copy-closure, once we have an SSHStore class,
e.g.
$ nix copy --from ssh://alice@machine /nix/store/abcd...
This allows commands like "nix verify --all" or "nix path-info --all"
to work on S3 caches.
Unfortunately, this requires some ugly hackery: when querying the
contents of the bucket, we don't want to have to read every .narinfo
file. But the S3 bucket keys only include the hash part of each store
path, not the name part. So as a special exception
queryAllValidPaths() can now return store paths *without* the name
part, and queryPathInfo() accepts such store paths (returning a
ValidPathInfo object containing the full name).
Caching path info is generally useful. For instance, it speeds up "nix
path-info -rS /run/current-system" (i.e. showing the closure sizes of
all paths in the closure of the current system) from 5.6s to 0.15s.
This also eliminates some APIs like Store::queryDeriver() and
Store::queryReferences().
