This provides a significant speedup, e.g. 64 s -> 12 s for
nix-build --dry-run -I nixpkgs=channel:nixos-16.03 '<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
on a cold local and CloudFront cache.
The alternative is to use lots of concurrent daemon connections but
that seems wasteful.
This is useless because the client also caches path info, and can
cause problems for long-running clients like hydra-queue-runner
(i.e. it may return cached info about paths that have been
garbage-collected).
This fixes "No such file or directory" when opening /dev/ptmx
(e.g. http://hydra.nixos.org/build/51094249).
The reason appears to be some changes to /dev/ptmx / /dev/pts handling
between Linux 4.4 and 4.9. See
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/7832531/.
The fix is to go back to mounting a proper /dev/pts instance inside
the sandbox. Happily, this now works inside user namespaces, even for
unprivileged users. So
NIX_REMOTE=local?root=/tmp/nix nix-build \
'<nixpkgs/nixos/tests/misc.nix>' -A test
works for non-root users.
The downside is that the fix breaks sandbox builds on older kernels
(probably pre-4.6), since mounting a devpts fails inside user
namespaces for some reason I've never been able to figure out. Builds
on those systems will fail with
error: while setting up the build environment: mounting /dev/pts: Invalid argument
Ah well.
Execute a given program with the (optional) given arguments as the
user running the evaluation, parsing stdout as an expression to be
evaluated.
There are many use cases for nix that would benefit from being able to
run arbitrary code during evaluation, including but not limited to:
* Automatic git fetching to get a sha256 from a git revision
* git rev-parse HEAD
* Automatic extraction of information from build specifications from
other tools, particularly language-specific package managers like
cabal or npm
* Secrets decryption (e.g. with nixops)
* Private repository fetching
Ideally, we would add this functionality in a more principled way to
nix, but in the mean time 'builtins.exec' can be used to get these
tasks done.
The primop is only available when the
'allow-unsafe-native-code-during-evaluation' nix option is true. That
flag also enables the 'importNative' primop, which is strictly more
powerful but less convenient (since it requires compiling a plugin
against the running version of nix).
So if "text-compression=br", the .ls file in S3 will get a
Content-Encoding of "br". Brotli appears to compress better than xz
for this kind of file and is natively supported by browsers.
