For frameworks it's important that structures are as lazy as possible
to prevent infinite recursions, performance issues and errors that
aren't related to the thing to evaluate. As a consequence, they have
to emit more attributes than strictly (sic) necessary.
However, these attributes with empty values are not useful to the user
so we omit them.
This makes 'nix build' work on paths (which will be copied to the
store) and store paths (returned as is). E.g. the following flake
output attributes can be built using 'nix build .#foo':
foo = ./src;
foo = self.outPath;
foo = builtins.fetchTarball { ... };
foo = (builtins.fetchTree { .. }).outPath;
foo = builtins.fetchTree { .. } + "/README.md";
foo = builtins.storePath /nix/store/...;
Note that this is potentially risky, e.g.
foo = /.;
will cause Nix to try to copy the entire file system to the store.
What doesn't work yet:
foo = self;
foo = builtins.fetchTree { .. };
because we don't handle attrsets with an outPath attribute in it yet,
and
foo = builtins.storePath /nix/store/.../README.md;
since result symlinks have to point to a store path currently (rather
than a file inside a store path).
Fixes#7417.
Robert Hensing
