diff --git a/doc/manual/nix-store.xml b/doc/manual/nix-store.xml
index da3eae2ec..db5f8c344 100644
--- a/doc/manual/nix-store.xml
+++ b/doc/manual/nix-store.xml
@@ -128,6 +128,7 @@ lrwxrwxrwx 1 ... 2005-03-13 21:10 /home/eelco/bla/result -> /nix/store/1r1134
paths
+
@@ -166,6 +167,11 @@ the specified store paths. Realisation is a somewhat overloaded term:
output. (For non-derivations argument, the argument itself is
printed.)
+If the option is used, then
+nix-store will print on standard error a
+description of what packages would be built or downloaded, and then
+quit.
+
@@ -204,6 +210,10 @@ linkend="sec-nix-build">nix-build does.
+ bytes
+ nrlinks
+ atime
+
@@ -258,7 +268,70 @@ the Nix store not reachable via file system references from a set of
-The behaviour of the collector is influenced by the By default, all unreachable paths are deleted. The following
+options control what gets deleted and in what order:
+
+
+
+ bytes
+
+ Keep deleting paths until at least
+ bytes bytes have been
+ deleted, then stop.
+
+
+
+ nrlinks
+
+ Keep deleting paths until the hard link count on
+ /nix/store is less than
+ nrlinks, then stop. This is useful for
+ very large Nix stores on filesystems with a 32000 subdirectories
+ limit (like ext3).
+
+
+
+ atime
+
+ Only delete a store path if its last-accessed time
+ is less than atime. This allows you to
+ garbage-collect only packages that haven’t been used recently.
+ The time is expressed as the number of seconds in the Unix epoch,
+ i.e., since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. An easy way to convert to
+ this format is date +%s -d "date
+ specification".
+
+ For directories, the last-accessed time is the highest
+ last-accessed time of any regular file in the directory (or in any
+ of its subdirectories). That is, the atime
+ field maintained by the filesystem is ignored for directories.
+ This is because operations such as rebuilding the
+ locate database tend to update the
+ atime values of all directories, so they’re not
+ a useful indicator of whether a package was recently used.
+
+ Note that nix-store --optimise reads all
+ regular files in the Nix store, and so causes all last-accessed
+ times to be set to the present time. This makes
+ ineffective (for a while at
+ least).
+
+
+
+
+
+ Delete store paths in order of ascending
+ last-accessed time. This is useful in conjunction with the other
+ options to delete only the least recently used
+ packages.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The behaviour of the collector is also influenced by the gc-keep-outputs
and gc-keep-derivations
@@ -284,6 +357,20 @@ deleting `/nix/store/kq82idx6g0nyzsp2s14gfsc38npai7lf-cairo-1.0.4.tar.gz.drv'
+To delete unreachable paths not accessed in the last two months:
+
+
+$ nix-store --gc -v --max-atime $(date +%s -d "2 months ago")
+
+
+
+To delete at least 100 MiBs of unreachable paths:
+
+
+$ nix-store --gc --max-freed $((100 * 1024 * 1024))
+
+
+
@@ -950,7 +1037,51 @@ ktorrent-2.2.1/NEWS
-
+
+
+Operation <option>--dump-db</option>
+
+
+ Synopsis
+
+ nix-store
+
+
+
+
+Description
+
+The operation writes a dump of the
+Nix database to standard output. It can be loaded into an empty Nix
+store using . This is useful for making
+backups and when migrating to different database schemas.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Operation <option>--dump-db</option>
+
+
+ Synopsis
+
+ nix-store
+
+
+
+
+Description
+
+The operation reads a dump of the Nix
+database created by from standard input and
+loads it into the Nix database.
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/doc/manual/release-notes.xml b/doc/manual/release-notes.xml
index eec4ab6ba..9d7bb4493 100644
--- a/doc/manual/release-notes.xml
+++ b/doc/manual/release-notes.xml
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ $ rm __db* log.* derivers references referrers reserved validpaths DB_CONFIG--max-links
N tells it to stop after the
link count on /nix/store has dropped below
- N. This is useful on very large Nix
+ N. This is useful for very large Nix
stores on filesystems with a 32000 subdirectories limit (like
ext3). The option
causes store paths to be deleted in order of ascending last access