As we are working towards Nix 3.0 we want to make sure that we make a
huge step forward in Nix's user experience. And once 3.0 is out of the
door we need to make sure that all future commands and features keep up
the standard of user experience.
This PR adds a CLI guideline document to the Nix documentation. Consider
this document a good starting point and a checklist when somebody will
be (re)implementing commands.
Clearly this guideline does nothing to improve user experience on its
own and can only be useful as long as it is going to be read and
cared for. But it is a first step into that direction.
Since c4c3c15c19 (#4251) building Nix for
macOS with sandboxing fails:
```
getting status of /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixpkgs: Operation not permitted
```
This happens, because `EvalSettings::getDefaultNixPath` tries to access
paths outside the sandbox. Since the state-dir is not required for
doc generation, it is set to the dummy folder. This needs to be done
for all nix invocations during doc generation, as
`EvalSettings::getDefaultNixPath` is called unconditionally.
This removes the extra-substituters and extra-sandbox-paths settings
and instead makes every array setting extensible by setting
"extra-<name> = <value>" in the configuration file or passing
"--<name> <value>" on the command line.
pkgs.fetchurl supports an executable argument, which is especially nice
when downloading a large executable. This patch adds the same option to
nix-prefetch-url.
I have tested this to work on the simple case of prefetching a little
executable:
1. nix-prefetch-url --executable https://my/little/script
2. Paste the hash into a pkgs.fetchurl-based package, script-pkg.nix
3. Delete the output from the store to avoid any misidentified artifacts
4. Realise the package script-pkg.nix
5. Run the executable
I repeated the above while using --name, as well.
I suspect --executable would have no meaningful effect if combined with
--unpack, but I have not tried it.
Otherwise, the steps advertised in this document won't actually work
(e.g. `make install` will fail, trying to access /usr, and
`./inst/bin/nix` won't exist).
Some users have their own hashed-mirrors setup, that is used to mirror
things in addition to what’s available on tarballs.nixos.org. Although
this should be feasable to do with a Binary Cache, it’s not always
easy, since you have to remember what "name" each of the tarballs has.
Continuing to support hashed-mirrors is cheap, so it’s best to leave
support in Nix. Note that NIX_HASHED_MIRRORS is also supported in
Nixpkgs through fetchurl.nix.
Note that this excludes tarballs.nixos.org from the default, as in
\#3689. All of these are available on cache.nixos.org.
Robert Hensing
Maximilian Bosch
Jade Lovelace