This makes it easier to create a diverted store, i.e.
NIX_REMOTE="local?root=/tmp/root"
instead of
NIX_REMOTE="local?real=/tmp/root/nix/store&state=/tmp/root/nix/var/nix" NIX_LOG_DIR=/tmp/root/nix/var/log
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().
This enables an optimisation in hydra-queue-runner, preventing a
download of a NAR it just uploaded to the cache when reading files
like hydra-build-products.
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
For example,
$ nix-build --hash -A nix-repl.src
will build the fixed-output derivation nix-repl.src (a fetchFromGitHub
call), but instead of *verifying* the hash given in the Nix
expression, it prints out the resulting hash, and then moves the
result to its content-addressed location in the Nix store. E.g
build produced path ‘/nix/store/504a4k6zi69dq0yjc0bm12pa65bccxam-nix-repl-8a2f5f0607540ffe56b56d52db544373e1efb980-src’ with sha256 hash ‘0cjablz01i0g9smnavhf86imwx1f9mnh5flax75i615ml71gsr88’
The goal of this is to make all nix-prefetch-* scripts unnecessary: we
can just let Nix run the real thing (i.e., the corresponding fetch*
derivation).
Another example:
$ nix-build --hash -E 'with import <nixpkgs> {}; fetchgit { url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nix.git"; sha256 = "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"; }'
...
git revision is 9e7c1a4bbd
...
build produced path ‘/nix/store/gmsnh9i7x4mb7pyd2ns7n3c9l90jfsi1-nix’ with sha256 hash ‘1188xb621diw89n25rifqg9lxnzpz7nj5bfh4i1y3dnis0dmc0zp’
(Having to specify a fake sha256 hash is a bit annoying...)
Previously, to build a derivation remotely, we had to copy the entire
closure of the .drv file to the remote machine, even though we only
need the top-level derivation. This is very wasteful: the closure can
contain thousands of store paths, and in some Hydra use cases, include
source paths that are very large (e.g. Git/Mercurial checkouts).
So now there is a new operation, StoreAPI::buildDerivation(), that
performs a build from an in-memory representation of a derivation
(BasicDerivation) rather than from a on-disk .drv file. The only files
that need to be in the Nix store are the sources of the derivation
(drv.inputSrcs), and the needed output paths of the dependencies (as
described by drv.inputDrvs). "nix-store --serve" exposes this
interface.
Note that this is a privileged operation, because you can construct a
derivation that builds any store path whatsoever. Fixing this will
require changing the hashing scheme (i.e., the output paths should be
computed from the other fields in BasicDerivation, allowing them to be
verified without access to other derivations). However, this would be
quite nice because it would allow .drv-free building (e.g. "nix-env
-i" wouldn't have to write any .drv files to disk).
Fixes#173.
