Changes:
* The divider lines are gone. These were in practice a bit confusing,
in particular with --show-trace or --keep-going, since then there
were multiple lines, suggesting a start/end which wasn't the case.
* Instead, multi-line error messages are now indented to align with
the prefix (e.g. "error: ").
* The 'description' field is gone since we weren't really using it.
* 'hint' is renamed to 'msg' since it really wasn't a hint.
* The error is now printed *before* the location info.
* The 'name' field is no longer printed since most of the time it
wasn't very useful since it was just the name of the exception (like
EvalError). Ideally in the future this would be a unique, easily
googleable error ID (like rustc).
* "trace:" is now just "…". This assumes error contexts start with
something like "while doing X".
Example before:
error: --- AssertionError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
assertion 'false' failed
----------------------------------------------------- show-trace -----------------------------------------------------
trace: while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Example after:
error: assertion 'false' failed
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
… while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
This exploits the hermetic nature of flake evaluation to speed up
repeated evaluations of a flake output attribute.
For example (doing 'nix build' on an already present package):
$ time nix build nixpkgs:firefox
real 0m1.497s
user 0m1.160s
sys 0m0.139s
$ time nix build nixpkgs:firefox
real 0m0.052s
user 0m0.038s
sys 0m0.007s
The cache is ~/.cache/nix/eval-cache-v1.sqlite, which has entries like
INSERT INTO Attributes VALUES(
X'92a907d4efe933af2a46959b082cdff176aa5bfeb47a98fabd234809a67ab195',
'packages.firefox',
1,
'/nix/store/pbalzf8x19hckr8cwdv62rd6g0lqgc38-firefox-67.0.drv /nix/store/g6q0gx0v6xvdnizp8lrcw7c4gdkzana0-firefox-67.0 out');
where the hash 92a9... is a fingerprint over the flake store path and
the contents of the lockfile. Because flakes are evaluated in pure
mode, this uniquely identifies the evaluation result.
Jörg Thalheim