This flag causes paths that do not have a known substitute to be
quietly ignored. This is mostly useful for Charon, allowing it to
speed up deployment by letting a machine use substitutes for all
substitutable paths, instead of uploading them. The latter is
frequently faster, e.g. if the target machine has a fast Internet
connection while the source machine is on a slow ADSL line.
This operation allows fixing corrupted or accidentally deleted store
paths by redownloading them using substituters, if available.
Since the corrupted path cannot be replaced atomically, there is a
very small time window (one system call) during which neither the old
(corrupted) nor the new (repaired) contents are available. So
repairing should be used with some care on critical packages like
Glibc.
"nix-channel --add" now accepts a second argument: the channel name.
This allows channels to have a nicer name than (say) nixpkgs_unstable.
If no name is given, it defaults to the last component of the URL
(with "-unstable" or "-stable" removed).
Also, channels are now stored in a profile
(/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/$USER/channels). One advantage of
this is that it allows rollbacks (e.g. if "nix-channel --update" gives
an undesirable update).
(Linux) machines no longer maintain the atime because it's too
expensive, and on the machines where --use-atime is useful (like the
buildfarm), reading the atimes on the entire Nix store takes way too
much time to make it practical.
need any info on substitutable paths, we just call the substituters
(such as download-using-manifests.pl) directly. This means that
it's no longer necessary for nix-pull to register substitutes or for
nix-channel to clear them, which makes those operations much faster
(NIX-95). Also, we don't have to worry about keeping nix-pull
manifests (in /nix/var/nix/manifests) and the database in sync with
each other.
The downside is that there is some overhead in calling an external
program to get the substitutes info. For instance, "nix-env -qas"
takes a bit longer.
Abolishing the substitutes table also makes the logic in
local-store.cc simpler, as we don't need to store info for invalid
paths. On the downside, you cannot do things like "nix-store -qR"
on a substitutable but invalid path (but nobody did that anyway).
* Never catch interrupts (the Interrupted exception).
nix-store query options `--referer' and `--referer-closure' have
been changed to `--referrer' and `--referrer-closure' (but the old
ones are still accepted for compatibility).
unreachable paths that haven't been used for N hours. For instance,
`nix-collect-garbage --min-age 168' only deletes paths that haven't
been accessed in the last week.
This is useful for instance in the build farm where many derivations
can be shared between consecutive builds, and we wouldn't want a
garbage collect to throw them all away. We could of course register
them as roots, but then we'd to unregister them at some point, which
would be a pain to manage. The `--min-age' flag gives us a sort of
MRU caching scheme.
BUG: this really shouldn't be in gc.cc since that violates
mechanism/policy separation.
