This allows disabling the use of binary caches, e.g.
$ nix-build ... --option use-binary-caches false
Note that
$ nix-build ... --option binary-caches ''
does not disable all binary caches, since the caches defined by
channels will still be used.
If ‘--link’ is given, nix-push will create hard links to the NAR files
in the store, rather than copying them. This is faster and requires
less disk space. However, it doesn't work if the store is on a
different file system.
I.e. do what git does. I'm too lazy to keep the builtin help text up
to date :-)
Also add ‘--help’ to various commands that lacked it
(e.g. nix-collect-garbage).
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.
Commit 6a214f3e06 copied most of the Nix
shell initialisation code from NixOS to nix-profile.sh; however, that
code assumes a multi-user install and is Linux-specific (e.g. it calls
the "stat" command). So go back to the simple single-user version.
Fixes#49.
Negative lookups are purged from the DB after a day, at most once per
day. However, for non-"have" lookups (e.g. all except "nix-env
-qas"), negative lookups are ignored after one hour. This is to
ensure that you don't have to wait a day for an operation like
"nix-env -i" to start using new binaries in the cache.
Should probably make this configurable.
Note that this will only work if the client has a very recent Nix
version (post 15e1b2c223), otherwise the
--option flag will just be ignored.
Fixes#50.
This handles the chroot and build hook cases, which are easy.
Supporting the non-chroot-build case will require more work (hash
rewriting!).
Issue #21.
Output names are now appended to resulting GC symlinks, e.g. by
nix-build. For backwards compatibility, if the output is named "out",
nothing is appended. E.g. doing "nix-build -A foo" on a derivation
that produces outputs "out", "bin" and "dev" will produce symlinks
"./result", "./result-bin" and "./result-dev", respectively.
Channels can now advertise a binary cache by creating a file
<channel-url>/binary-cache-url. The channel unpacker puts these in
its "binary-caches" subdirectory. Thus, the URLS of the binary caches
for the channels added by root appear in
/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/eelco/channels/binary-caches/*. The
binary cache substituter reads these and adds them to the list of
binary caches.
The .nixpkg file format is extended to optionally include the URL of a
binary cache, which will be used in preference to the manifest URL
(which can be set to a non-existent value).
Querying all substitutable paths via "nix-env -qas" is potentially
hard on a server, since it involves sending thousands of HEAD
requests. So a binary cache must now have a meta-info file named
"nix-cache-info" that specifies whether the server wants this. It
also specifies the store prefix so that we don't send useless queries
to a binary cache for a different store prefix.
Since SubstitutionGoal::finished() in build.cc computes the hash
anyway, we can prevent the inefficiency of computing the hash twice by
letting the substituter tell Nix about the expected hash, which can
then verify it.
Commit 6a214f3e06 reused the NixOS
environment initialisation for nix-profile.sh, but this is
inappropriate on systems that don't have multi-user support enabled.
In "nix-env -qas", we don't need the substitute info, we just need to
know if it exists. This can be done using a HTTP HEAD request, which
saves bandwidth.
Note however that curl currently has a bug that prevents it from
reusing HTTP connections if HEAD requests return a 404:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3542731&group_id=976&atid=100976
Without the patch attached to the issue, using HEAD is actually quite
a bit slower than GET.
