This is a little convenience command that opens the Nix expression of
the specified package. For example,
nix edit nixpkgs.perlPackages.Moose
opens <nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/perl-packages.nix> in $EDITOR (at the
right line number for some editors).
This requires the package to have a meta.position attribute.
There is a security issue when a build accidentally stores its $TMPDIR
in some critical place, such as an RPATH. If
TMPDIR=/tmp/nix-build-..., then any user on the system can recreate
that directory and inject libraries into the RPATH of programs
executed by other users. Since /build probably doesn't exist (or isn't
world-writable), this mitigates the issue.
Opening an SSHStore or LegacySSHStore does not actually establish a
connection, so the try/catch block here did nothing. Added a
Store::connect() method to test whether a connection can be
established.
This is useful for one-off situations where you want to specify a
builder on the command line instead of having to mess with
nix.machines. E.g.
$ nix-build -A hello --argstr system x86_64-darwin \
--option builders 'root@macstadium1 x86_64-darwin'
will perform the specified build on "macstadium1".
It also removes the need for a separate nix.machines file since you
can specify builders in nix.conf directly. (In fact nix.machines is
yet another hack that predates the general nix.conf configuration
file, IIRC.)
Note: this option is supported by the daemon for trusted users. The
fact that this allows trusted users to specify paths to SSH keys to
which they don't normally have access is maybe a bit too much trust...
For backwards compatibility, if the URI is just a hostname, ssh://
(i.e. LegacySSHStore) is prepended automatically.
Also, all fields except the URI are now optional. For example, this is
a valid nix.machines file:
local?root=/tmp/nix
This is useful for testing the remote build machinery since you don't
have to mess around with ssh.
This is to simplify remote build configuration. These environment
variables predate nix.conf.
The build hook now has a sensible default (namely build-remote).
The current load is kept in the Nix state directory now.
Since build-remote uses buildDerivation() now, we don't need to copy
the .drv file anymore. This greatly reduces the set of input paths
copied to the remote side (e.g. from 392 to 51 store paths for GNU
hello on x86_64-darwin).
This default implementation of buildPaths() does nothing if all
requested paths are already valid, and throws an "unsupported
operation" error otherwise. This fixes a regression introduced by
c30330df6f in binary cache and legacy
SSH stores.
With catch-all rules, we hide potential errors.
It turns out that a4744254 made one cath-all useless. Flex detected that
is was impossible to reach.
The other is more subtle, as it can only trigger on unfinished escapes
in unfinished strings, which only occurs at EOF.
This caused "nix-store --import" to compute an incorrect hash on NARs
that don't fit in an unsigned int. The import would succeed, but
"nix-store --verify-path" or subsequent exports would detect an
incorrect hash.
A deeper issue is that the export/import format does not contain a
hash, so we can't detect such issues early.
Also, I learned that -Wall does not warn about this.
So for instance "nix copy --to ... nixpkgs.hello" will build
nixpkgs.hello first. It's debatable whether this is a good idea. It
seems desirable for commands like "nix copy" but maybe not for
commands like "nix path-info".
Thus
$ nix build -f foo.nix
will build foo.nix.
And
$ nix build
will build default.nix. However, this may not be a good idea because
it's kind of inconsistent, given that "nix build foo" will build the
"foo" attribute from the default installation source (i.e. the
synthesis of $NIX_PATH), rather than ./default.nix. So I may revert
this.
