This way the links are clearly within the manual (ie not absolute paths),
while allowing snippets to reference the documentation root reliably,
regardless of at which base url they're included.
Prior to this change, we had a bunch of ad-hoc string manipulation code
scattered around. This made it hard to figure out what data model for
string contexts is.
Now, we still store string contexts most of the time as encoded strings
--- I was wary of the performance implications of changing that --- but
whenever we parse them we do so only through the
`NixStringContextElem::parse` method, which handles all cases. This
creates a data type that is very similar to `DerivedPath` but:
- Represents the funky `=<drvpath>` case as properly distinct from the
others.
- Only encodes a single output, no wildcards and no set, for the
"built" case.
(I would like to deprecate `=<path>`, after which we are in spitting
distance of `DerivedPath` and could maybe get away with fewer types, but
that is another topic for another day.)
This makes the position object used in exceptions abstract, with a
method getSource() to get the source code of the file in which the
error originated. This is needed for lazy trees because source files
don't necessarily exist in the filesystem, and we don't want to make
libutil depend on the InputAccessor type in libfetcher.
Make everything be in the form "while ..." (most things were already),
and in particular *don't* use other propositions that must go after or
before specific "while ..." clauses to make sense.
The old way was not correct.
Here is an example:
```
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr 'let x = a: throw "asdf"; in x 1' --show-trace
error: asdf
… while evaluating 'x'
at «string»:1:9:
1| let x = a: throw "asdf"; in x 1
| ^
… from call site
at «string»:1:29:
1| let x = a: throw "asdf"; in x 1
| ^
```
and yet also:
```
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr 'let x = a: throw "asdf"; in x' --show-trace
<LAMBDA>
```
Here is the thing: in both cases we are evaluating `x`!
Nix is a higher-order languages, and functions are a sort of value. When
we write `x = a: ...`, `a: ...` is the expression that `x` is being
defined to be, and that is already a value. Therefore, we should *never*
get an trace that says "while evaluating `x`", because evaluating `a:
...` is *trival* and nothing happens during it!
What is actually happening here is we are applying `x` and evaluating
its *body* with arguments substituted for parameters. I think the
simplest way to say is just "while *calling* `x`", and so that is what I
changed it to.
It calls strlen() on the input (rather than simply copying at most
`size` bytes), which can fail if the input is not zero-terminated and
is inefficient in any case.
Fixes#7347.
When calling `builtins.readFile` on a store path, the references of that
path are currently added to the resulting string's context.
This change makes those references the *possible* context of the string,
but filters them to keep only the references whose hash actually appears
in the string, similarly to what is done for determining the runtime
references of a path.
Robert Hensing
Yorick