There is a long-standing race condition when copying a closure to a
remote machine, particularly affecting build-remote.pl: the client
first asks the remote machine which paths it already has, then copies
over the missing paths. If the garbage collector kicks in on the
remote machine between the first and second step, the already-present
paths may be deleted. The missing paths may then refer to deleted
paths, causing nix-copy-closure to fail. The client now performs both
steps using a single remote Nix call (using ‘nix-store --serve’),
locking all paths in the closure while querying.
I changed the --serve protocol a bit (getting rid of QueryCommand), so
this breaks the SSH substituter from older versions. But it was marked
experimental anyway.
Fixes#141.
This substituter connects to a remote host, runs nix-store --serve
there, and then forwards substituter commands on to the remote host and
sends their results to the calling program. The ssh-substituter-hosts
option can be specified as a list of hosts to try.
This is an initial implementation and, while it works, it has some
limitations:
* Only the first host is used
* There is no caching of query results (all queries are sent to the
remote machine)
* There is no informative output (such as progress bars)
* Some failure modes may cause unhelpful error messages
* There is no concept of trusted-ssh-substituter-hosts
Signed-off-by: Shea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>
