nix-store -r (or some other operation) is started via ssh, it will
at least have a chance of terminating quickly when the connection is
killed. Right now it just runs to completion, because it never
notices that stderr is no longer connected to anything. Of course
it would be better if sshd would just send a SIGHUP, but it doesn't
(https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396).
derivation should be a source rather than a derivation dependency of
the call to the NAR derivation. Otherwise the derivation (and all
its dependencies) will be built as a side-effect, which may not even
succeed.
SHA-256 outputs of fixed-output derivations. I.e. they now produce
the same store path:
$ nix-store --add x
/nix/store/j2fq9qxvvxgqymvpszhs773ncci45xsj-x
$ nix-store --add-fixed --recursive sha256 x
/nix/store/j2fq9qxvvxgqymvpszhs773ncci45xsj-x
the latter being the same as the path that a derivation
derivation {
name = "x";
outputHashAlgo = "sha256";
outputHashMode = "recursive";
outputHash = "...";
...
};
produces.
This does change the output path for such fixed-output derivations.
Fortunately they are quite rare. The most common use is fetchsvn
calls with SHA-256 hashes. (There are a handful of those is
Nixpkgs, mostly unstable development packages.)
* Documented the computation of store paths (in store-api.cc).
dependency. `storePath /nix/store/bla' gives exactly the same
result as `toPath /nix/store/bla', except that the former includes
/nix/store/bla in the dependency context of the string.
Useful in some generated Nix expressions like nix-push, which now
finally does the right thing wrt distributed builds. (Previously
the path to be packed wasn't an explicit dependency, so it wouldn't
be copied to the remote machine.)
subtle and often hard-to-reproduce bugs where programs in pipes
either barf with a "Broken pipe" message or not, depending on the
exact timing conditions. This particularly happened in GNU M4 (and
Bison, which uses M4).
disasters involving `rm -rf' on bind mounts. Will try the
definitive fix (per-process mounts, apparently possible via the
CLONE_NEWNS flag in clone()) some other time.
accessed time of paths that may be deleted. Anything more recently
used won't be deleted. The time is specified in time_t,
e.g. seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC; use `date +%s' to
convert to time_t from the command line.
Example: to delete everything that hasn't been used in the last two
months:
$ nix-store --gc -v --max-atime $(date +%s -d "2 months ago")
order of ascending last access time. This is useful in conjunction
with --max-freed or --max-links to prefer deleting non-recently used
garbage, which is good (especially in the build farm) since garbage
may become live again.
The code could easily be modified to accept other criteria for
ordering garbage by changing the comparison operator used by the
priority queue in collectGarbage().
attributes from the meta attribute. Not doing so caused nix-env to
barf on the "psi" package, which has a meta.function attribute,
the textual serialisation of which causes a gigantic string to be
produced --- so big that it causes nix-env to run out of memory.
Note however that "meta" really only should contain strings.
meta.function should be passthru.function.
particular, dietlibc cannot figure out the cwd because the inode of
the current directory doesn't appear in .. (because getdents returns
the inode of the mount point).
(which means it can only be defined via "inherit"), otherwise we get
scoping bugs, since __overrides can't be recursive (or at least, it
would be hard).
need /etc in the chroot (in particular, /etc/resolv.conf for
fetchurl). Not having /etc/resolv.conf in the chroot is a good
thing, since we don't want normal derivations to download files.
~/.nix-defexpr, otherwise the attribute cannot be selected with the
`-A' option. Useful if you want to stick a Nix expression directly
in ~/.nix-defexpr.
a rec. This will be very useful to allow end-user customisation of
all-packages.nix, for instance globally overriding GCC or some other
dependency. The // operator doesn't cut it: you could replace the
"gcc" attribute, but all other attributes would continue to
reference the original value due to the substitution semantics of
rec.
The syntax is a bit hacky but this is to allow backwards
compatibility.
in attribute set pattern matches. This allows defining a function
that takes *at least* the listed attributes, while ignoring
additional attributes. For instance,
{stdenv, fetchurl, fuse, ...}:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
...
};
defines a function that requires an attribute set that contains the
specified attributes but ignores others. The main advantage is that
we can then write in all-packages.nix
aefs = import ../bla/aefs pkgs;
instead of
aefs = import ../bla/aefs {
inherit stdenv fetchurl fuse;
};
This saves a lot of typing (not to mention not having to update
all-packages.nix with purely mechanical changes). It saves as much
typing as the "args: with args;" style, but has the advantage that
the function arguments are properly declared (not implicit in what
the body of the "with" uses).
functions that take a single argument (plain lambdas) into one AST
node (Function) that contains a Pattern node describing the
arguments. Current patterns are single lazy arguments (VarPat) and
matching against an attribute set (AttrsPat).
This refactoring allows other kinds of patterns to be added easily,
such as Haskell-style @-patterns, or list pattern matching.
`-u'. Instead of acquiring an exclusive lock on the profile for the
entire duration of the operation, we just perform the operation
optimistically (without an exclusive lock), and check at the end
whether the profile changed while we were busy (i.e., the symlink
target changed). If so, the operation is restarted. Restarting is
generally cheap, since the build results are still in the Nix store.
Most of the time, only the user environment has to be rebuilt.
again. (After the previous substituter mechanism refactoring I
didn't update the code that obtains the references of substitutable
paths.) This required some refactoring: the substituter programs
are now kept running and receive/respond to info requests via
stdin/stdout.
it only does something if $NIX_OTHER_STORES (not really a good
name...) is set.
* Do globbing on the elements of $NIX_OTHER_STORES. E.g. you could
set it to /mnts/*/nix or something.
* Install substituters in libexec/nix/substituters.
logic through the `parseDrvName' and `compareVersions' primops.
This will allow expressions to easily check whether some dependency
is a specific needed version or falls in some version range. See
tests/lang/eval-okay-versions.nix for examples.
bytes have been freed, `--max-links' to stop when the Nix store
directory has fewer than N hard links (the latter being important
for very large Nix stores on filesystems with a 32000 subdirectories
limit).
store under the reference relation, since that means that the
garbage collector will need a long time to start deleting paths.
Instead just delete the referrers of a path first.
This isn't usually a problem, except that it causes tests to fail
when performed in a directory with a very long path name. So chdir
to the socket directory and use a relative path name.
/tmp/nix-<pid>-<counter> for temporary build directories. This
increases purity a bit: many packages store the temporary build path
in their output, causing (generally unimportant) binary differences.
undefined variables by definition. This matters for the
implementation of "with", which does a call to checkVarDefs to see
if the body of the with has no undefined variables. (It can't be
checked at parse time because you don't know which variables are in
the "with" attribute set.) If we check closed terms, then we check
not just the with body but also the substituted terms, which are
typically very large. This is the cause of the poor nix-env
performance on Nixpkgs lately. It didn't happen earlier because
"with" wasn't used very often in the past.
This fix improves nix-env performance roughly 60x on current Nixpkgs.
nix-env -qa is down from 29.3s to 0.5s on my laptop, and nix-env -qa
--out-path is down from 229s to 3.39s. Not bad for a 1-line fix :-)
single quotes. Example (from NixOS):
job = ''
start on network-interfaces
start script
rm -f /var/run/opengl-driver
${if videoDriver == "nvidia"
then "ln -sf ${nvidiaDrivers} /var/run/opengl-driver"
else if cfg.driSupport
then "ln -sf ${mesa} /var/run/opengl-driver"
else ""
}
rm -f /var/log/slim.log
end script
'';
This style has two big advantages:
- \, ' and " aren't special, only '' and ${. So you get a lot less
escaping in shell scripts / configuration files in Nixpkgs/NixOS.
The delimiter '' is rare in scripts (and can usually be written as
""). ${ is also fairly rare.
Other delimiters such as <<...>>, {{...}} and <|...|> were also
considered but this one appears to have the fewest drawbacks
(thanks Martin).
- Indentation is intelligently stripped so that multi-line strings
can follow the nesting structure of the containing Nix
expression. E.g. in the example above 6 spaces are stripped from
the start of each line. This prevents unnecessary indentation in
generated files (which sometimes even breaks things).
See tests/lang/eval-okay-ind-string.nix for some examples.
$ nix-env -e $(which firefox)
or
$ nix-env -e /nix/store/nywzlygrkfcgz7dfmhm5xixlx1l0m60v-pan-0.132
* nix-env -i: if an argument contains a slash anywhere, treat it as a
path and follow it through symlinks into the Nix store. This allows
things like
$ nix-build -A firefox
$ nix-env -i ./result
* nix-env -q/-i/-e: don't complain when the `*' selector doesn't match
anything. In particular, `nix-env -q \*' doesn't fail anymore on an
empty profile.
but installations/upgrades as well. So `nix-env -ub \*' will
upgrade only those packages for which a substitute is available (or
to be precise, it will upgrade each package to the highest version
for which a substitute is available).
executed in a chroot that contains just the Nix store, the temporary
build directory, and a configurable set of additional directories
(/dev and /proc by default). This allows a bit more purity
enforcement: hidden build-time dependencies on directories such as
/usr or /nix/var/nix/profiles are no longer possible. As an added
benefit, accidental network downloads (cf. NIXPKGS-52) are prevented
as well (because files such as /etc/resolv.conf are not available in
the chroot).
However the usefulness of chroots is diminished by the fact that
many builders depend on /bin/sh, so you need /bin in the list of
additional directories. (And then on non-NixOS you need /lib as
well...)
usage by finding identical files in the store and hard-linking them
to each other. It typically reduces the size of the store by
something like 25-35%. This is what the optimise-store.pl script
did, but the new command is faster and more correct (it's safe wrt
garbage collection and concurrent builds).
the given attribute path (just as -A does with other option)
(NIX-83). So you can now say
$ nix-env -qa -A nixpkgs_unstable.gnome \*
atk-1.12.4
esound-0.2.36
...
to see the packages in the "gnome" attribute in Nixpkgs.
To *print* the attribute path, you should now use "--attr-path" /
"-P" (running out of letters...).
Nix expressions in that directory are combined into an attribute set
{file1 = import file1; file2 = import file2; ...}, i.e. each Nix
expression is an attribute with the file name as the attribute
name. Also recurses into directories.
* nix-env: removed the "--import" (-I) option which set the
~/.nix-defexpr symlink.
* nix-channel: don't use "nix-env --import", instead symlink
~/.nix-defexpr/channels. So finally nix-channel --update doesn't
override any default Nix expressions but combines with them.
This means that you can have (say) a local Nixpkgs SVN tree and use
it as a default for nix-env:
$ ln -s .../path-to-nixpkgs-tree ~/.nix-defexpr/nixpkgs_svn
and be subscribed to channels (including Nixpkgs) at the same time.
(If there is any ambiguity, the -A flag can be used to
disambiguate, e.g. "nix-env -i -A nixpkgs_svn.pan".)
(/nix/var/nix/daemon-socket). This allows access to the Nix daemon
to be restricted by setting the mode/ownership on that directory as
desired, e.g.
$ chmod 770 /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket
$ chown root.wheel /nix/var/nix/daemon-socket
to allow only users in the wheel group to use Nix.
Setting the ownership on a socket is much trickier, since the socket
must be deleted and recreated every time the daemon is started
(which would require additional Nix configuration file directives to
specify the mode/ownership, and wouldn't support arbitrary ACLs),
some BSD variants appear to ignore permissions on sockets, and it's
not clear whether the umask is respected on every platform when
creating sockets.
fixed-output derivations or substitutions try to build the same
store path at the same time. Locking generally catches this, but
not between multiple goals in the same process. This happened
especially often (actually, only) in the build farm with fetchurl
downloads of the same file being executed on multiple machines and
then copied back to the main machine where they would clobber each
other (NIXBF-13).
Solution: if a goal notices that the output path is already locked,
then go to sleep until another goal finishes (hopefully the one
locking the path) and try again.
need any info on substitutable paths, we just call the substituters
(such as download-using-manifests.pl) directly. This means that
it's no longer necessary for nix-pull to register substitutes or for
nix-channel to clear them, which makes those operations much faster
(NIX-95). Also, we don't have to worry about keeping nix-pull
manifests (in /nix/var/nix/manifests) and the database in sync with
each other.
The downside is that there is some overhead in calling an external
program to get the substitutes info. For instance, "nix-env -qas"
takes a bit longer.
Abolishing the substitutes table also makes the logic in
local-store.cc simpler, as we don't need to store info for invalid
paths. On the downside, you cannot do things like "nix-store -qR"
on a substitutable but invalid path (but nobody did that anyway).
* Never catch interrupts (the Interrupted exception).
;-)
* Channels: fix channels that are plain lists of derivations (like
strategoxt-unstable) instead of functions (like nixpkgs-unstable).
This fixes the error message "error: the left-hand side of the
function call is neither a function nor a primop (built-in
operation) but a list".
get the basename of the channel URL (e.g., nixpkgs-unstable). The
top-level Nix expression of the channel is now an attribute set, the
attributes of which are the individual channels (e.g.,
{nixpkgs_unstable = ...; strategoxt_unstable = ...}). This makes
attribute paths ("nix-env -qaA" and "nix-env -iA") more sensible,
e.g., "nix-env -iA nixpkgs_unstable.subversion".
by priority and version install. That is, if there are multiple
packages with the same name, then pick the package with the highest
priority, and only use the version if there are multiple packages
with the same priority.
This makes it possible to mark specific versions/variant in Nixpkgs
more or less desirable than others. A typical example would be a
beta version of some package (e.g., "gcc-4.2.0rc1") which should not
be installed even though it is the highest version, except when it
is explicitly selected (e.g., "nix-env -i gcc-4.2.0rc1").
* Idem for nix-env -u, only the semantics are a bit trickier since we
also need to take into account the priority of the currently
installed package (we never upgrade to a lower priority, unless
--always is given).
a user environment by an install or upgrade action. This is
particularly useful if you have a version installed that you don't
want to upgrade (e.g., because the newer versions are broken).
Example:
$ nix-env -u zapping --dry-run
(dry run; not doing anything)
upgrading `zapping-0.9.6' to `zapping-0.10cvs6'
$ nix-env --set-flag keep true zapping
$ nix-env -u zapping --dry-run
(dry run; not doing anything)
However, "-e" will still uninstall the package. (Maybe we should
require the keep flag to be explicitly set to false before it can be
uninstalled.)
to show only those derivations whose output is already in the Nix
store or that can be substituted (i.e., downloaded from somewhere).
In other words, it shows the packages that can be installed “quickly”,
i.e., don’t need to be built from source.
evaluator. This was important because the NixOS expressions started
to hit 2 MB default stack size on Linux.
GCC is really dumb about stack space: it just adds up all the local
variables and temporaries of every scope into one huge stack frame.
This is really bad for deeply recursive functions. For instance,
every `throw Error(format("error message"))' causes a format object
of a few hundred bytes to be allocated on the stack. As a result,
every recursive call to evalExpr2() consumed 4680 bytes. By
splitting evalExpr2() and by moving the exception-throwing code out
of the main functions, evalExpr2() now only consumes 40 bytes.
Similar for evalExpr().
which paths specified on the command line are invalid (i.e., don't
barf when encountering an invalid path, just print it). This is
useful for build-remote.pl to figure out which paths need to be
copied to a remote machine. (Currently we use rsync, but that's
rather inefficient.)
--export' into the Nix store, and optionally check the cryptographic
signatures against /nix/etc/nix/signing-key.pub. (TODO: verify
against a set of public keys.)
path. This is like `nix-store --dump', only it also dumps the
meta-information of the store path (references, deriver). Will add
a `--sign' flag later to add a cryptographic signature, which we
will use for exchanging store paths between build farm machines in a
secure manner.
attribute) about installed packages in user environments. Thus, an
operation like `nix-env -q --description' shows useful information
not only on available packages but also on installed packages.
* nix-env now passes the entire manifest as an argument to the Nix
expression of the user environment builder (not just a list of
paths), so that in particular the user environment builder has
access to the meta attributes.
* New operation `--set-flag' in nix-env to change meta info of
installed packages. This will be useful to pass per-package
policies to the user environment builder (e.g., how to resolve
collision or whether to disable a package (NIX-80)) or upgrade
policies in nix-env (e.g., that a package should be "masked", that
is, left untouched by upgrade actions). Example:
$ nix-env --set-flag enabled false ghc-6.4
computing the store path (NIX-77). This is an important security
property in multi-user Nix stores.
Note that this changes the store paths of derivations (since the
derivation aterms are added using addTextToStore), but not most
outputs (unless they use builtins.toFile).
* `sub' to subtract two numbers.
* `stringLength' to get the length of a string.
* `substring' to get a substring of a string. These should be enough
to allow most string operations to be expressed.
programs, so if a builder uses TMPDIR, then it will fail when
executed through nix-setuid-helper. In fact Glibc clears a whole
bunch of variables (see sysdeps/generic/unsecvars.h in the Glibc
sources), but only TMPDIR should matter in practice. As a
workaround, we reinitialise TMPDIR from NIX_BUILD_TOP.
important to get garbage collection to work if there is any
inconsistency in the database (because the referrer table is used to
determine whether it is safe to delete a path).
* `nix-store --verify': show some progress.
* nix-unpack-closure: extract the top-level paths from the closure and
print them on stdout. This allows them to be installed, e.g.,
"nix-env -i $(nix-unpack-closure)". (NIX-64)
<derivation outPath=... drvPath=...> attrs </derivation>. Only emit
the attributes of any specific derivation only. This prevents
exponententially large XML output due to the absense of sharing.
from a source directory. All files for which a predicate function
returns true are copied to the store. Typical example is to leave
out the .svn directory:
stdenv.mkDerivation {
...
src = builtins.filterSource
(path: baseNameOf (toString path) != ".svn")
./source-dir;
# as opposed to
# src = ./source-dir;
}
This is important because the .svn directory influences the hash in
a rather unpredictable and variable way.
single derivation specified by the argument. This is useful when we
want to have a profile for a single derivation, such as a server
configuration. Then we can just say (e.g.)
$ nix-env -p /.../server-profile -f server.nix --set -A server
We can't do queries or upgrades on such a profile, but we can do
rollbacks. The advantage over -i is that we don't have to worry
about other packages having been installed in the profile
previously; --set gets rid of them.
matters when running as root, since then we don't use the setuid
helper (which already used lchown()).
* Also check for an obscure security problem on platforms that don't
have lchown. Then we can't change the ownership of symlinks, which
doesn't matter *except* when the containing directory is writable by
the owner (which is the case with the top-level Nix store directory).
* Throw more exceptions as BuildErrors instead of Errors. This
matters when --keep-going is turned on. (A BuildError is caught
and terminates the goal in question, an Error terminates the
program.)
seconds without producing output on stdout or stderr (NIX-65). This
timeout can be specified using the `--max-silent-time' option or the
`build-max-silent-time' configuration setting. The default is
infinity (0).
* Fix a tricky race condition: if we kill the build user before the
child has done its setuid() to the build user uid, then it won't be
killed, and we'll potentially lock up in pid.wait(). So also send a
conventional kill to the child.
that have to be done as root: running builders under different uids,
changing ownership of build results, and deleting paths in the store
with the wrong ownership).
`nix-store --delete'. But unprivileged users are not allowed to
ignore liveness.
* `nix-store --delete --ignore-liveness': ignore the runtime roots as
well.
process, so forward the operation.
* Spam the user about GC misconfigurations (NIX-71).
* findRoots: skip all roots that are unreadable - the warnings with
which we spam the user should be enough.
processes can register indirect roots. Of course, there is still
the problem that the garbage collector can only read the targets of
the indirect roots when it's running as root...
* SIGIO -> SIGPOLL (POSIX calls it that).
* Use sigaction instead of signal to register the SIGPOLL handler.
Sigaction is better defined, and a handler registered with signal
appears not to interrupt fcntl(..., F_SETLKW, ...), which is bad.
via the Unix domain socket in /nix/var/nix/daemon.socket. The
server forks a worker process per connection.
* readString(): use the heap, not the stack.
* Some protocol fixes.
* Added `build-users-group', the group under which builds are to be
performed.
* Check that /nix/store has 1775 permission and is owner by the
build-users-group.
The problem is that when we kill the client while the worker is
building, and the builder is not writing anything to stderr, then
the worker never notice that the socket is closed on the other side,
so it just continues indefinitely. The solution is to catch SIGIO,
which is sent when the far side of the socket closes, and simulate
an normal interruption. Of course, SIGIO is also sent every time
the client sends data over the socket, so we only enable the signal
handler when we're not expecting any data...
mode. Presumably nix-worker would be setuid to the Nix store user.
The worker performs all operations on the Nix store and database, so
the caller can be completely unprivileged.
This is already much more secure than the old setuid scheme, since
the worker doesn't need to do Nix expression evaluation and so on.
Most importantly, this means that it doesn't need to access any user
files, with all resulting security risks; it only performs pure
store operations.
Once this works, it is easy to move to a daemon model that forks off
a worker for connections established through a Unix domain socket.
That would be even more secure.
* Some refactoring: put the NAR archive integer/string serialisation
code in a separate file so it can be reused by the worker protocol
implementation.
containing functions that operate on the Nix store. One
implementation is LocalStore, which operates on the Nix store
directly. The next step, to enable secure multi-user Nix, is to
create a different implementation RemoteStore that talks to a
privileged daemon process that uses LocalStore to perform the actual
operations.
Rather, setuid support is now always compiled in (at least on
platforms that have the setresuid system call, e.g., Linux and
FreeBSD), but it must enabled by chowning/chmodding the Nix
binaries.
gives a huge speedup in operations that read or write from standard
input/output. (So libstdc++'s I/O isn't that bad, you just have to
call std::ios::sync_with_stdio(false).) For instance, `nix-store
--register-substitutes' went from 1.4 seconds to 0.1 seconds on a
certain input. Another victory for Valgrind.
graph to be passed to a builder. This attribute should be a list of
pairs [name1 path1 name2 path2 ...]. The references graph of each
`pathN' will be stored in a text file `nameN' in the temporary build
directory. The text files have the format used by `nix-store
--register-validity'. However, the deriver fields are left empty.
`exportReferencesGraph' is useful for builders that want to do
something with the closure of a store path. Examples: the builders
that make initrds and ISO images for NixOS.
`exportReferencesGraph' is entirely pure. It's necessary because
otherwise the only way for a builder to get this information would
be to call `nix-store' directly, which is not allowed (though
unfortunately possible).
available. For instance,
$ nix-store -l $(which svn) | less
lets you read the build log of the Subversion instance in your
profile.
* `nix-store -qb': if applied to a non-derivation, take the deriver.
check that the references of the output of a derivation are in the
specified set. For instance,
allowedReferences = [];
specifies that the output cannot have any references. (This is
useful, for instance, for the generation of bootstrap binaries for
stdenv-linux, which must not have any references for purity). It
could also be used to guard against undesired runtime dependencies,
e.g.,
{gcc, dynlib}: derivation {
...
allowedReferences = [dynlib];
}
says that the output can refer to the path of `dynlib' but not
`gcc'. A `forbiddedReferences' attribute would be more useful for
this, though.
concatenation and string coercion. This was a big mess (see
e.g. NIX-67). Contexts are now folded into strings, so that they
don't cause evaluation errors when they're not expected. The
semantics of paths has been clarified (see nixexpr-ast.def).
toString() and coerceToString() have been merged.
Semantic change: paths are now copied to the store when they're in a
concatenation (and in most other situations - that's the
formalisation of the meaning of a path). So
"foo " + ./bla
evaluates to "foo /nix/store/hash...-bla", not "foo
/path/to/current-dir/bla". This prevents accidental impurities, and
is more consistent with the treatment of derivation outputs, e.g.,
`"foo " + bla' where `bla' is a derivation. (Here `bla' would be
replaced by the output path of `bla'.)
side should be a path, I guess.
* Handle paths that are in the store but not direct children of the
store directory.
* Ugh, hack to prevent double context wrapping.
attribute existence and to return an attribute from an attribute
set, respectively. Example: `hasAttr "foo" {foo = 1;}'. They
differ from the `?' and `.' operators in that the attribute name is
an arbitrary expression. (NIX-61)
Nix-env failed to call addPermRoot(), which is necessary to safely
add a new root. So if nix-env started after and finished before the
garbage collector, the user environment (plus all other new stuff)
it built might be garbage collected, leading to a dangling symlink
chain in ~/.nix-profile...
* Be more explicit if we block on the GC lock ("waiting for the big
garbage collector lock...").
* Don't loop trying to create a new generation. It's not necessary
anymore since profiles are locked nowadays.
and returns its path. This can be used to (for instance) write
builders inside a Nix expression, e.g.,
stdenv.mkDerivation {
builder = "
source $stdenv/setup
...
";
...
}
derivation attributes to flatten them into strings. This is
possible since string can nowadays be wrapped in contexts that
describe the derivations/sources referenced by the evaluation of the
string.
all the primops. This allows Nix expressions to test for new
primops and take appropriate action if they're not available. For
instance, rather than calling a primop `foo' directly, they could
say `if builtins ? foo then builtins.foo ... else ...'.
writable. File permissions on Cygwin are rather complex, and in this
case this check introduced a problem with build jobs invoke from
outside of Cygwin (MSYS). It seemed almost impossible to fix the
permissions of the directory, so for now this safety check is disabled
on Cygwin.
https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/buildfarm-control/trunk/ext/nix/,
with some modifications. This allows `nix-env -qa' to show the
attribute path that can be used to unambiguously install a package
using `nix-env -i -A'. Example:
$ nix-env -f top-level/all-packages.nix -qaA subversion xorg-server
subversionWithJava subversion-1.2.3
subversion subversion-1.3.2
subversion14 subversion-1.4.0pre-rc1
xorg.xorgserver xorg-server-1.1.0
e.g.,
$ nix-env -i -A subversion xorg.xorgserver
The main advantage over using symbolic names is that using attribute
names is unambiguous and much, much faster.
argument has a valid value, i.e., is in a certain domain. E.g.,
{ foo : [true false]
, bar : ["a" "b" "c"]
}: ...
This previously could be done using assertions, but domain checks
will allow the buildfarm to automatically extract the configuration
space from functions.
"--with-freetype2-library=" + freetype + "/lib"
can now be written as
"--with-freetype2-library=${freetype}/lib"
An arbitrary expression can be enclosed within ${...}, not just
identifiers.
* Escaping in string literals: \n, \r, \t interpreted as in C, any
other character following \ is interpreted as-is.
* Newlines are now allowed in string literals.
packages (provided that they have a `meta.description' attribute).
E.g.,
$ ./src/nix-env/nix-env -qa --description gcc
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x (cross-compiler for sparc-linux)
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x (cross-compiler for mips-linux)
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x (cross-compiler for arm-linux)
gcc-4.0.2 GNU Compiler Collection, 4.0.x
to be queried, e.g., `nix-env -qa firefox'. This does require the
argument '*' to be passed if one wants information about all
derivations, so the old `nix-env -qa' now is `nix-env -qa "*"'.
instantiation, e.g. "nix-env -i" and "nix-env -qas" (but not
"nix-env -qa"). It turns out that many redundant calls to
addToStore(path) were made, which reads and hashes the entire path.
For instance, the bash bootstrap binary in Nixpkgs would be read and
hashed many times. As a result nix-env would spend around 92% of
its time in the function sha256_block (according to callgrind).
Some simple memoization fixes this.
expressions that cause an assertion failure (like `assert system ==
"i686-linux"'). This allows all-packages.nix in Nixpkgs to be used
on all platforms, even if some Nix expressions don't work on all
platforms.
Not sure if this is a good idea; it's a bit hacky. In particular,
due to laziness some derivations might appear in `nix-env -qa' but
disappear in `nix-env -qas' or `nix-env -i'.
Commit 5000!
with the same name *and* version number, and pick the first one
(this means that the order in which channels appear in
~/.nix-channels matters). E.g.:
$ nix-env ii aterm
warning: there are multiple derivations named `aterm-2.4.2'; using the first one
installing `aterm-2.4.2'
the disk is full (because to delete something from the Nix store, we
need a Berkeley DB transaction, which takes up disk space). Under
normal operation, we make sure that there exists a file
/nix/var/nix/db/reserved of 1 MB. When running the garbage
collector, we delete that file before we open the Berkeley DB
environment.
implementations of MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256. The main benefit is that
we get assembler-optimised implementations of MD5 and SHA-1 (though
not SHA-256 (at least on x86), unfortunately). OpenSSL's SHA-1
implementation on Intel is twice as fast as ours.
derivation(s) we're interested, e.g.,
$ nix-instantiate ./all-packages.nix --attr xlibs.libX11
List elements can also be selected:
$ nix-instantiate ./build-for-release.nix --attr 0.subversion
This allows a non-ambiguous specification of a derivation. Of
course, this should also be added to nix-env and nix-build.
creates a new process group but also a new session. New sessions
have no controlling tty, so child processes like ssh cannot open
/dev/tty (which is bad).
intended). This ensures that any ssh child processes to remote
machines are also killed, and thus the Nix process on the remote
machine also exits. Without this, the remote Nix process will
continue until it exists or until its stdout buffer gets full and it
locks up. (Partially fixes NIX-35.)
deletes a path even if it is reachable from a root. However, it
won't delete a path that still has referrers (since that would
violate store invariants).
Don't try this at home. It's a useful hack for recovering from
certain situations in a somewhat clean way (e.g., holes in closures
due to disk corruption).
nix-store query options `--referer' and `--referer-closure' have
been changed to `--referrer' and `--referrer-closure' (but the old
ones are still accepted for compatibility).
mapping. The referer table is replaced by a referrer table (note
spelling fix) that stores each referrer separately. That is,
instead of having
referer[P] = {Q_1, Q_2, Q_3, ...}
we store
referer[(P, Q_1)] = ""
referer[(P, Q_2)] = ""
referer[(P, Q_3)] = ""
...
To find the referrers of P, we enumerate over the keys with a value
lexicographically greater than P. This requires the referrer table
to be stored as a B-Tree rather than a hash table.
(The tuples (P, Q) are stored as P + null-byte + Q.)
Old Nix databases are upgraded automatically to the new schema.
Nix is properly shut down when it receives those signals. In
particular this ensures that killing the garbage collector doesn't
cause a subsequent database recovery.
builder. Instead, require that the Nix store has sticky permission
(S_ISVTX); everyone can created files in the Nix store, but they
cannot delete, rename or modify files created by others.
root (or setuid root), then builds will be performed under one of
the users listed in the `build-users' configuration variables. This
is to make it impossible to influence build results externally,
allowing locally built derivations to be shared safely between
users (see ASE-2005 paper).
To do: only one builder should be active per build user.
versions to available versions, or vice versa.
For example, the following compares installed versions to available
versions:
$ nix-env -qc
autoconf-2.59 = 2.59
automake-1.9.4 < 1.9.6
f-spot-0.0.10 - ?
firefox-1.0.4 < 1.0.7
...
I.e., there are newer versions available (in the current default Nix
expression) for Automake and Firefox, but not for Autoconf, and
F-Spot is missing altogether.
Conversely, the available versions can be compared to the installed
versions:
$ nix-env -qac
autoconf-2.59 = 2.59
automake-1.9.6 > 1.9.4
bash-3.0 - ?
firefox-1.0.7 > 1.0.4
...
Note that bash is available but no version of it is installed.
If multiple versions are available for comparison, then the highest
is used. E.g., if Subversion 1.2.0 is installed, and Subversion
1.1.4 and 1.2.3 are available, then `nix-env -qc' will print `<
1.2.3', not `> 1.1.4'.
If higher versions are available, the version column is printed in
red (using ANSI escape codes).
dependencyClosure { ... searchPath = [ ../foo ../bar ]; ... }
* Primop `dirOf' to return the directory part of a path (e.g., dirOf
/a/b/c == /a/b).
* Primop `relativise' (according to Webster that's a real word!) that
given paths A and B returns a string representing path B relative
path to A; e.g., relativise /a/b/c a/b/x/y => "../x/y".
determination (e.g., finding the header files dependencies of a C
file) in Nix low-level builds automatically.
For instance, in the function `compileC' in make/lib/default.nix, we
find the header file dependencies of C file `main' as follows:
localIncludes =
dependencyClosure {
scanner = file:
import (findIncludes {
inherit file;
});
startSet = [main];
};
The function works by "growing" the set of dependencies, starting
with the set `startSet', and calling the function `scanner' for each
file to get its dependencies (which should yield a list of strings
representing relative paths). For instance, when `scanner' is
called on a file `foo.c' that includes the line
#include "../bar/fnord.h"
then `scanner' should yield ["../bar/fnord.h"]. This list of
dependencies is absolutised relative to the including file and added
to the set of dependencies. The process continues until no more
dependencies are found (hence its a closure).
`dependencyClosure' yields a list that contains in alternation a
dependency, and its relative path to the directory of the start
file, e.g.,
[ /bla/bla/foo.c
"foo.c"
/bla/bar/fnord.h
"../bar/fnord.h"
]
These relative paths are necessary for the builder that compiles
foo.c to reconstruct the relative directory structure expected by
foo.c.
The advantage of `dependencyClosure' over the old approach (using
the impure `__currentTime') is that it's completely pure, and more
efficient because it only rescans for dependencies (i.e., by
building the derivations yielded by `scanner') if sources have
actually changed. The old approach rescanned every time.
(closed(closed(closed(...)))) since this reduces performance by
producing bigger terms and killing caching (which incidentally also
prevents useful infinite recursion detection).
with default values automatically. I.e., e -> e {}.
This feature makes convenience expressions such as
pkgs/system/i686-linux.nix in Nixpkgs obsolete, since we can just do
$ nix-instantiate ./pkgs/system/all-packages.nix
since all-packages.nix takes a single argument (system) that has a
default value (__thisSystem).
`removeAttrs attrs ["x", "y"]' returns the set `attrs' with the
attributes named `x' and `y' removed. It is not an error for the
named attributes to be missing from the input set.
* Make the `derivation' primitive much more lazy. The expression
`derivation attrs' now evaluates to (essentially)
attrs // {
type = "derivation";
outPath = derivation! attrs;
drvPath = derivation! attrs;
}
where `derivation!' is a primop that does the actual derivation
instantiation (i.e., it does what `derivation' used to do). The
advantage is that it allows commands such as `nix-env -qa' and
`nix-env -i' to be much faster since they no longer need to
instantiate all derivations, just the `name' attribute. (However,
`nix-env' doesn't yet take advantage of this since it still always
evaluates the `outPath' and `drvPath' attributes).
Also, this allows derivations to cyclically reference each other,
for example,
webServer = derivation {
...
hostName = "svn.cs.uu.nl";
services = [svnService];
};
svnService = derivation {
...
hostName = webServer.hostName;
};
Previously, this would yield a black hole (infinite recursion).
derivations. This is mostly to simplify the implementation of
nix-prefetch-{url, svn}, which now work properly in setuid
installations.
* Enforce valid store names in `nix-store --add / --add-fixed'.
continue building when one fails unless `--keep-going' is
specified.
* When `--keep-going' is specified, print out the set of failing
derivations at the end (otherwise it can be hard to find out which
failed).
multiple times is also a top-level goal, then the second and later
instantiations would never be created because there would be a
stable pointer to the first one that would keep it alive in the
WeakGoalMap.
* Some tracing code for debugging this kind of problem.
of the given derivation. Useful for getting a quick overview of how
something was built. E.g., to find out how the `baffle' program in
your user environment was built, you can do
$ nix-store -q --tree $(nix-store -qd $(which baffle))
Tree nesting depth is minimised (?) by topologically sorting paths
under the relation A < B iff A \in closure(B).
environment elements from one user environment to another, e.g.,
$ nix-env -i --from-profile /nix/var/nix/profiles/other-profile aterm
copies the `aterm' component installed in the `other-profile' to the
user's current profile.
user environment, e.g.,
$ nix-env -i /nix/store/z58v41v21xd3ywrqk1vmvdwlagjx7f10-aterm-2.3.1.drv
or
$ nix-env -i /nix/store/hsyj5pbn0d9iz7q0aj0fga7cpaadvp1l-aterm-2.3.1
This is useful because it allows Nix expressions to be bypassed
entirely. For instance, if only a nix-pull manifest is provided,
plus the top-level path of some component, it can be installed
without having to supply the Nix expression (e.g., for obfuscation,
or to be independent of Nix expression language changes or context
dependencies).
install derivations from a Nix expression specified on the command
line. This is particularly useful for disambiguation if there are
multiple derivations with the same name. For instance, in Nixpkgs,
to install the Firefox wrapper rather than the plain Firefox
component:
$ nix-env -f .../i686-linux.nix -i -E 'x: x.firefoxWrapper'
The Nix expressions should be functions to which the default Nix
expression (in this case, `i686-linux.nix') is passed, hence `x:
...'.
This might also be a nice way to deal with high-level (user-level)
variability, e.g.,
$ nix-env -f ./server.nix -i -E 'x: x {port = 8080; ssl = false;}'
to derivations in user environments. Nice for developers (since it
prevents build-time-only dependencies from being GC'ed, in
conjunction with `gc-keep-outputs'). Turned off by default.
* Set the references for the user environment manifest properly.
* Don't copy the manifest (this was accidental).
* Don't store derivation paths in the manifest (maybe this should be
made optional). This cleans up the semantics of nix-env, which were
weird.
* Hash on the output paths of activated components, not on derivation
paths. This is because we don't know the derivation path of already
installed components anymore, and it allows the installation of
components by store path (skipping Nix expressions entirely).
* Query options `--out-path' and `--drv-path' to show the output and
derivation paths of components, respectively (the latter replaces
the `--expr' query).
* Removed some dead code (successor stuff) from nix-push.
* Updated terminology in the tests (store expr -> drv path).
* Check that the deriver is set properly in the tests.
for finding build-time dependencies (possibly after a build). E.g.,
$ nix-store -qb aterm $(nix-store -qd $(which strc))
/nix/store/jw7c7s65n1gwhxpn35j9rgcci6ilzxym-aterm-2.3.1
* Arguments to nix-store can be files within store objects, e.g.,
/nix/store/jw7c...-aterm-2.3.1/bin/baffle.
* Idem for garbage collector roots.
This was necessary becase root finding must be done after
acquisition of the global GC lock.
This makes `nix-collect-garbage' obsolete; it is now just a wrapper
around `nix-store --gc'.
* Automatically remove stale GC roots (i.e., indirect GC roots that
point to non-existent paths).
get rid of GC roots. Nix-build places a symlink `result' in the
current directory. Previously, removing that symlink would not
remove the store path being linked to as a GC root. Now, the GC
root created by nix-build is actually a symlink in
`/nix/var/nix/gcroots/auto' to `result'. So if that symlink is
removed the GC root automatically becomes invalid (since it can no
longer be resolved). The root itself is not automatically removed -
the garbage collector should delete dangling roots.
immediately add the result as a permanent GC root. This is the only
way to prevent a race with the garbage collector. For instance, the
old style
ln -s $(nix-store -r $(nix-instantiate foo.nix)) \
/nix/var/nix/gcroots/result
has two time windows in which the garbage collector can interfere
(by GC'ing the derivation and the output, respectively). On the
other hand,
nix-store --add-root /nix/var/nix/gcroots/result -r \
$(nix-instantiate --add-root /nix/var/nix/gcroots/drv \
foo.nix)
is safe.
* nix-build: use `--add-root' to prevent GC races.
being created after the garbage collector has read the temproots
directory. This blocks the creation of new processes, but the
garbage collector could periodically release the GC lock to allow
them to run.
that they are deleted in an order that maintains the closure
invariant.
* Presence of a path in a temporary roots file does not imply that all
paths in its closure are also present, so add the closure.
roots to a per-process temporary file in /nix/var/nix/temproots
while holding a write lock on that file. The garbage collector
acquires read locks on all those files, thus blocking further
progress in other Nix processes, and reads the sets of temporary
roots.
though). In particular it's now much easier to register a GC root.
Just place a symlink to whatever store path it is that you want to
keep in /nix/var/nix/gcroots.
This simplifies garbage collection and `nix-store --query
--requisites' since we no longer need to treat derivations
specially.
* Better maintaining of the invariants, e.g., setReferences() can only
be called on a valid/substitutable path.
closure of the referers relation rather than the references
relation, i.e., the set of all paths that directly or indirectly
refer to the given path. Note that contrary to the references
closure this set is not fixed; it can change as paths are added to
or removed from the store.
promise :-) This allows derivations to specify on *what* output
paths of input derivations they are dependent. This helps to
prevent unnecessary downloads. For instance, a build might be
dependent on the `devel' and `lib' outputs of some library
component, but not the `docs' output.
graph. That is, `nix-store --query --references PATH' shows the set
of paths referenced by PATH, and `nix-store --query --referers PATH'
shows the set of paths referencing PATH.
`derivations.cc', etc.
* Store the SHA-256 content hash of store paths in the database after
they have been built/added. This is so that we can check whether
the store has been messed with (a la `rpm --verify').
* When registering path validity, verify that the closure property
holds.
representation of closures as ATerms in the Nix store. Instead, the
file system pointer graph is now stored in the Nix database. This
has many advantages:
- It greatly simplifies the implementation (we can drop the notion
of `successors', and so on).
- It makes registering roots for the garbage collector much easier.
Instead of specifying the closure expression as a root, you can
simply specify the store path that must be retained as a root.
This could not be done previously, since there was no way to find
the closure store expression containing a given store path.
- Better traceability: it is now possible to query what paths are
referenced by a path, and what paths refer to a path.
* Formalise the notion of fixed-output derivations, i.e., derivations
for which a cryptographic hash of the output is known in advance.
Changes to such derivations should not propagate upwards through the
dependency graph. Previously this was done by specifying the hash
component of the output path through the `id' attribute, but this is
insecure since you can lie about it (i.e., you can specify any hash
and then produce a completely different output). Now the
responsibility for checking the output is moved from the builder to
Nix itself.
A fixed-output derivation can be created by specifying the
`outputHash' and `outputHashAlgo' attributes, the latter taking
values `md5', `sha1', and `sha256', and the former specifying the
actual hash in hexadecimal or in base-32 (auto-detected by looking
at the length of the attribute value). MD5 is included for
compatibility but should be considered deprecated.
* Removed the `drvPath' pseudo-attribute in derivation results. It's
no longer necessary.
* Cleaned up the support for multiple output paths in derivation store
expressions. Each output now has a unique identifier (e.g., `out',
`devel', `docs'). Previously there was no way to tell output paths
apart at the store expression level.
* `nix-hash' now has a flag `--base32' to specify that the hash should
be printed in base-32 notation.
* `fetchurl' accepts parameters `sha256' and `sha1' in addition to
`md5'.
* `nix-prefetch-url' now prints out a SHA-1 hash in base-32. (TODO: a
flag to specify the hash.)
bits, then encode them in a radix-32 representation (using digits
and letters except e, o, u, and t). This produces store paths like
/nix/store/4i0zb0z7f88mwghjirkz702a71dcfivn-aterm-2.3.1. The nice
thing about this is that the hash part of the file name is still 32
characters, as before with MD5.
(Of course, shortening SHA-256 to 160 bits makes it no better than
SHA-160 in theory, but hopefully it's a bit more resistant to
attacks; it's certainly a lot slower.)
* Start cleaning up unique store path generation (they weren't always
unique; in particular the suffix ("-aterm-2.2", "-builder.sh") was
not part of the hash, therefore changes to the suffix would cause
multiple store objects with the same hash).
http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/bsdiff-4.2.tar.gz) into the source
tree. The license is a bit peculiar, but it does allow verbatim
copying, which is what we do here (i.e., so don't make any changes
to the sources).
- Drop the store expression. So now a substitute is just a
command-line invocation (a program name + arguments). If you
register a substitute you are responsible for registering the
expression that built it (if any) as a root of the garbage
collector.
- Drop the substitutes-rev DB table.
Instead we generate data bindings (build and match functions) for
the constructors specified in `constructors.def'. In particular
this removes the conversions between AFuns and strings, and Nix
expression evaluation now seems 3 to 4 times faster.
out the AST as an ATerm.
* Mode `--eval-only' to parse and evaluate the input, and print the
resulting normal form as an ATerm.
Neither of these modes require store/DB write permission.
The expression `with E1; E2' evaluates to E2 with all bindings in
the attribute set E1 substituted. E.g.,
with {x = 123;}; x
evaluates to 123. That is, the attribute set E1 is in scope in E2.
This is particularly useful when importing files containing lots
definitions. E.g., instead of
let {
inherit (import ./foo.nix) a b c d e f;
body = ... a ... f ...;
}
we can now say
with import ./foo.nix;
... a ... f ...
I.e., we don't have to say what variables should be brought into scope.
permission to the Nix store or database. E.g., `nix-env -qa' will
work, but `nix-env -qas' won't (the latter needs DB access). The
option `--readonly-mode' forces this mode; otherwise, it's only
activated when the database cannot be opened.
derivation, since NormalisationGoal would first run a
NormalisationGoal on the subderivation (a no-op, since in a
situation where we need fallback the successor is known), and then
runs a RealisationGoal on the normal form, which then cannot do a
fallback because it doesn't know the derivation expression for which
it is a normal form.
Tossed out the 2-phase normalisation/realisation in
NormalisationGoal and SubstitutionGoal since it's no longer needed -
a RealisationGoal will run a NormalisationGoal if necessary.
profile. Arguments are either generation number, or `old' to delete
all non-current generations. Typical use:
$ nix-env --delete-generations old
$ nix-collect-garbage
* istringstream -> string2Int.
Previously there was the problem that all files read by nix-env
etc. should be reachable and readable by the Nix user. So for
instance building a Nix expression in your home directory meant that
the home directory should have at least g+x or o+x permission so
that the Nix user could reach the Nix expression. Now we just
switch back to the original user just prior to reading sources and
the like. The places where this happens are somewhat arbitrary,
however. Any scope that has a live SwitchToOriginalUser object in
it is executed as the original user.
* Back out r1385. setreuid() sets the saved uid to the new
real/effective uid, which prevents us from switching back to the
original uid. setresuid() doesn't have this problem (although the
manpage has a bug: specifying -1 for the saved uid doesn't leave it
unchanged; an explicit value must be specified).
more common than the latter (which exists only on Linux and
FreeBSD). We don't really care about dropping the saved IDs since
there apparently is no way to quiry them in any case, so it can't
influence the build (unlike the effective IDs which are checked by
Perl for instance).
setuid installation, since the calling user may have a more fascist
umask (say, 0077), which would cause the store objects built by Nix
to be unreadable to anyone other than the Nix user.
unreachable paths that haven't been used for N hours. For instance,
`nix-collect-garbage --min-age 168' only deletes paths that haven't
been accessed in the last week.
This is useful for instance in the build farm where many derivations
can be shared between consecutive builds, and we wouldn't want a
garbage collect to throw them all away. We could of course register
them as roots, but then we'd to unregister them at some point, which
would be a pain to manage. The `--min-age' flag gives us a sort of
MRU caching scheme.
BUG: this really shouldn't be in gc.cc since that violates
mechanism/policy separation.
doesn't just print the set of paths that should be deleted. So
there is no more need to pipe the result into `nix-store --delete'
(which doesn't even exist anymore).
suboperations `--print-live', `--print-dead', and `--delete'. The
roots are not determined by nix-store; they are read from standard
input. This is to make it easy to customise what the roots are.
The collector now no longer fails when store expressions are missing
(which legally happens when using substitutes). It never tries to
fetch paths through substitutes.
TODO: acquire a global lock on the store while garbage collecting.
* Removed `nix-store --delete'.
set the real uid and gid to the effective uid and gid, the Nix
binaries can be installed as owned by the Nix user and group instead
of root, so no root involvement of any kind is necessary.
Linux and FreeBSD have these functions.
users.
If the configure flag `--enable-setuid' is used, the Nix programs
nix-env, nix-store, etc. are installed with the setuid bit turned on
so that they are executed as the user and group specified by
`--with-nix-user=USER' and `--with-nix-group=GROUP', respectively
(with defaults `nix' and `nix').
The setuid programs drop all special privileges if they are executed
by a user who is not a member of the Nix group.
The setuid feature is a quick hack to enable sharing of a Nix
installation between users who trust each other. It is not
generally secure, since any user in the Nix group can modify (by
building an appropriate derivation) any object in the store, and for
instance inject trojans into binaries used by other users.
The setuid programs are owned by root, not the Nix user. This is
because on Unix normal users cannot change the real uid, only the
effective uid. Many programs don't work properly when the real uid
differs from the effective uid. For instance, Perl will turn on
taint mode. However, the setuid programs drop all root privileges
immediately, changing all uids and gids to the Nix user and group.
* Builder output is written to standard error by default.
* The option `-B' is gone.
* The option `-Q' suppresses builder output.
The result of this is that most Nix invocations shouldn't need any
flags w.r.t. logging.
derivation disables scanning for dependencies. Use at your own
risk. This is a quick hack to speed up UML image generation (image
are very big, say 1 GB).
It would be better if the scanner were faster, and didn't read the
whole file into memory.
system types other than the current system. I.e., `nix-env -i'
won't install derivations for other system types, and `nix-env -q'
won't show them. The flag `--system-filter SYSTEM' can be used to
override the system type used for filtering (but not for
building!). The value `*' can be used not to filter anything.
Whenever Nix attempts to realise a derivation for which a closure is
already known, but this closure cannot be realised, fall back on
normalising the derivation.
The most common scenario in which this is useful is when we have
registered substitutes in order to perform binary distribution from,
say, a network repository. If the repository is down, the
realisation of the derivation will fail. When this option is
specified, Nix will build the derivation instead. Thus, binary
installation falls back on a source installation. This option is
not the default since it is generally not desirable for a transient
failure in obtaining the substitutes to lead to a full build from
source (with the related consumption of resources).
much as possible. (This is similar to GNU Make's `-k' flag.)
* Refactoring to implement this: previously we just bombed out when
a build failed, but now we have to clean up. In particular this
means that goals must be freed quickly --- they shouldn't hang
around until the worker exits. So the worker now maintains weak
pointers in order not to prevent garbage collection.
* Documented the `-k' and `-j' flags.
improve throughput.
* Don't build the `substitute-rev' table for now, since it caused
Theta(N^2) time and log file consumption when adding N substitutes.
Maybe we can do without it.
* A better substitute mechanism.
Instead of generating a store expression for each store path for
which we have a substitute, we can have a single store expression
that builds a generic program that is invoked to build the desired
store path, which is passed as an argument.
This means that operations like `nix-pull' only produce O(1) files
instead of O(N) files in the store when registering N substitutes.
(It consumes O(N) database storage, of course, but that's not a
performance problem).
* Added a test for the substitute mechanism.
* `nix-store --substitute' reads the substitutes from standard input,
instead of from the command line. This prevents us from running
into the kernel's limit on command line length.
* When a fast build wakes up a goal, try to start that goal in the
same iteration of the startBuild() loop of run(). Otherwise no job
might be started until the next job terminates.
in parallel. Hooks are more efficient: locks on output paths are
only acquired when the hook says that it is willing to accept a
build job. Hooks now work in two phases. First, they should first
tell Nix whether they are willing to accept a job. Nix guarantuees
that no two hooks will ever be in the first phase at the same time
(this simplifies the implementation of hooks, since they don't have
to perform locking (?)). Second, if they accept a job, they are
then responsible for building it (on the remote system), and copying
the result back. These can be run in parallel with other hooks and
locally executed jobs.
The implementation is a bit messy right now, though.
* The directory `distributed' shows a (hacky) example of a hook that
distributes build jobs over a set of machines listed in a
configuration file.
distributing a build action to another machine. In particular, the
paths in the input closures, the output paths, and successor mapping
for sub-derivations.
parallel as possible (similar to GNU Make's `-j' switch). This is
useful on SMP systems, but it is especially useful for doing builds
on multiple machines. The idea is that a large derivation is
initiated on one master machine, which then distributes
sub-derivations to any number of slave machines. This should not
happen synchronously or in lock-step, so the master must be capable
of dealing with multiple parallel build jobs. We now have the
infrastructure to support this.
TODO: substitutes are currently broken.
print a nice backtrace of the stack, rather than vomiting a gigantic
(and useless) aterm on the screen. Example:
error: while evaluating file `.../pkgs/system/test.nix':
while evaluating attribute `subversion' at `.../pkgs/system/all-packages-generic.nix', line 533:
while evaluating function at `.../pkgs/applications/version-management/subversion/default.nix', line 1:
assertion failed at `.../pkgs/applications/version-management/subversion/default.nix', line 13
Since the Nix expression language is lazy, the trace may be
misleading. The purpose is to provide a hint as to the location of
the problem.
instead of `derivation' triggered a huge slowdown in the Nix
expression evaluator. Total execution time of `nix-env -qa' went up
by a factor of 60 or so.
This scalability problem was caused by expressions such as
(x: y: ... x ...) a b
where `a' is a large term (say, the one in
`all-packages-generic.nix'). Then the first beta-reduction would
produce
(y: ... a ...) b
by substituting `a' for `x'. The second beta-reduction would then
substitute `b' for `y' into the body `... a ...', which is a large
term due to `a', and thus causes a large traversal to be performed
by substitute() in the second reduction. This is however entirely
redundant, since `a' cannot contain free variables (since we never
substitute below a weak head normal form).
The solution is to wrap substituted terms into a `Closed'
constructor, i.e.,
subst(subs, Var(x)) = Closed(e) iff subs[x] = e
have substitution not descent into closed terms,
subst(subs, Closed(x)) = Closed(x)
and otherwise ignore them for evaluation,
eval(Closed(x)) = eval(x).
* Fix a typo that caused incorrect substitutions to be performed in
simple lambdas, e.g., `(x: x: x) a' would reduce to `(x: a)'.
`bla:' is now no longer parsed as a URL.
* Re-enabled support for the `args' attribute in derivations to
specify command line arguments to the builder, e.g.,
...
builder = /usr/bin/python;
args = ["-c" ./builder.py];
...
This is because the contents of these symlinks are not incorporated
into the hashes of derivations, and could therefore cause a mismatch
between the build system and the target system. E.g., if
`/nix/store' is a symlink to `/data/nix/store', then a builder could
expand this path and store the result. If on the target system
`/nix/store' is not a symlink, or is a symlink that points somewhere
else, we have a dangling pointer.
The trigger for this change is that gcc 3.3.3 does exactly that (it
applies realpath() to some files, such as libraries, which causes
our impurity checker to bail out.)
An annoying side-effect of this change is that it makes it harder to
move the Nix store to a different file system. On Linux, bind
mounts can be used instead of symlink for this purpose (e.g., `mount
-o bind /data/nix/store /nix/store').
writes to stderr:
- `pretty': the old nested style (default)
- `escapes': uses escape codes to indicate nesting and message
level; can be processed using `log2xml'
- `flat': just plain text, no nesting
These can be set using `--log-type TYPE' or the NIX_LOG_TYPE
environment variable.
unimportant messages, it is collapsed by the default.
* Also added an optional integer argument to the escape code for opening a nesting
level to indicate lack of importance. If set, the tree is collapsed by default.
build logs. The program `log2xml' converts a Nix build log (read
from standard input) into XML file that can then be converted to
XHTML by the `log2html.xsl' stylesheet. The CSS stylesheet
`logfile.css' is necessary to make it look good.
This is primarily useful if the log file has a *tree structure*,
i.e., that sub-tasks such as the various phases of a build (unpack,
configure, make, etc.) or recursive invocations of Make are
represented as such. While a log file is in principle an
unstructured plain text file, builders can communicate this tree
structure to `log2xml' by using escape sequences:
- "\e[p" starts a new nesting level; the first line following the
escape code is the header;
- "\e[q" ends the current nesting level.
The generic builder in nixpkgs (not yet committed) uses this. It
shouldn't be to hard to patch GNU Make to speak this protocol.
Further improvements to the generated HTML pages are to allow
collapsing/expanding of subtrees, and to abbreviate store paths (but
to show the full path by hovering the mouse over it).
builders to point to the store and the temporary build directory,
respectively. Useful for purity checking.
* Also set TEMPDIR, TMPDIR, TEMP, and TEMP to NIX_BUILD_TOP to make
sure that tools in the builder store temporary files in the right
location.
* Do not create stuff in localstatedir when doing `make install'
(since we may not have write access). In general, installation of
constant code/data should be separate from the initialisation of
mutable state.
chroot() environment.
* A operation `--validpath' to register path validity. Useful for
bootstrapping in a pure Nix environment.
* Safety checks: ensure that files involved in store operations are in
the store.
derivation (i.e., the closure store expression) a root of the
garbage collector. This ensures that running `nix-collect-garbage
--no-successors' is safe.
whether we want to upgrade if the current version is less than the
available version (default), when it is less or equal, or always.
* Added a flag `--dry-run' to show what would happen in `--install',
`--uninstall', and `--upgrade', without actually performing the
operation.
of the current profile, e.g.,
$ nix-env --list-generations
...
39 2004-02-02 17:53:53
40 2004-02-02 17:55:18
41 2004-02-02 17:55:41
42 2004-02-02 17:55:50 (current)
$ nix-env --switch-generation 39
$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/default
... default -> default-39-link
* Also a command `--rollback' which is just a convenience operation to
rollback to the oldest generation younger than the current one.
Note that generations properly form a tree. E.g., if after
switching to generation 39, we perform an installation action,
a generation 43 is created which is a descendant of 39, not 42. So
a rollback from 43 ought to go back to 39. This is not currently
implemented; generations form a linear sequence.
default -> default-94-link
default-82-link -> /nix/store/cc4480...
default-83-link -> /nix/store/caeec8...
...
default-94-link -> /nix/store/2896ca...
experimental -> experimental-2-link
experimental-1-link -> /nix/store/cc4480...
experimental-2-link -> /nix/store/a3148f...
* `--profile' / `-p' -> `--switch-profile' / `-S'
* `--link' / `-l' -> `--profile' / `-p'
* The default profile is stored in $prefix/var/nix/profiles.
$prefix/var/nix/links is gone. Profiles can be stored anywhere.
* The current profile is now referenced from ~/.nix-profile, not
~/.nix-userenv.
* The roots to the garbage collector now have extension `.gcroot', not
`.id'.
other attribute sets, rather than the current scope. E.g.,
{inherit (pkgs) gcc binutils;}
is equivalent to
{gcc = pkgs.gcc; binutils = pkgs.binutils;}
I am not so happy about the syntax.
parser (roughly 80x faster).
The absolutely latest version of Bison (1.875c) is required for
reentrant GLR support, as well as a recent version of Flex (say,
2.5.31). Note that most Unix distributions ship with the
prehistoric Flex 2.5.4, which doesn't support reentrancy.
Nix. This is to prevent Berkeley DB from becoming wedged.
Unfortunately it is not possible to throw C++ exceptions from a
signal handler. In fact, you can't do much of anything except
change variables of type `volatile sig_atomic_t'. So we set an
interrupt flag in the signal handler and check it at various
strategic locations in the code (by calling checkInterrupt()).
Since this is unlikely to cover all cases (e.g., (semi-)infinite
loops), sometimes SIGTERM may now be required to kill Nix.
the output path of a derivation, not the path of its store
expression. This ensures that changes that affect the path of the
store expression but not the output path, do not affect the
`installed' state of a derivation.
it automatically removes log files when they are no longer needed.
*** IMPORTANT ***
If you have an existing Nix installation, you must checkpoint the
Nix database to prevent recent transactions from being undone. Do
the following:
- optional: make a backup of $prefix/var/nix/db.
- run `db_checkpoint' from Berkeley DB 4.1:
$ db_checkpoint -h $prefix/var/nix/db -1
- optional (?): run `db_recover' from Berkeley DB 4.1:
$ db_recover -h $prefix/var/nix/db
- remove $prefix/var/nix/db/log* and $prefix/var/nix/db/__db*
path of the Nix expression to be used with the import, upgrade, and
query commands. For instance,
$ nix-env -I ~/nixpkgs/pkgs/system/i686-linux.nix
$ nix-env --query --available [aka -qa]
sylpheed-0.9.7
bison-1.875
pango-1.2.5
subversion-0.35.1
...
$ nix-env -i sylpheed
$ nix-env -u subversion
There can be only one default at a time.
* If the path to a Nix expression is a symlink, follow the symlink
prior to resolving relative path references in the expression.
the symlink ~/.nix-userenv to the given argument (which defaults to
.../links/current). /etc/profile.d/nix-profile creates this symlink
if it doesn't exist yet. Example use:
$ nix-env -l my_profile -i foo.nix subversion quake
$ nix-env -p my_profile
I don't like the term "profile". Let's deprecate it :-)
nix-env -u foo.nix strategoxt
to replace the installed `strategoxt' derivation with the one from `foo.nix', if
the latter has a higher version number. This is a no-op if `strategoxt' is not
installed. Wildcards are also accepted, so
nix-env -u foo.nix '*'
will replace any installed derivation with newer versions from `foo.nix', if
available.
The notion of "version number" is somewhat ad hoc, but should be useful in most
cases, as evidenced by the following unit tests for the version comparator:
TEST("1.0", "2.3", -1);
TEST("2.1", "2.3", -1);
TEST("2.3", "2.3", 0);
TEST("2.5", "2.3", 1);
TEST("3.1", "2.3", 1);
TEST("2.3.1", "2.3", 1);
TEST("2.3.1", "2.3a", 1);
TEST("2.3pre1", "2.3", -1);
TEST("2.3pre3", "2.3pre12", -1);
TEST("2.3a", "2.3c", -1);
TEST("2.3pre1", "2.3c", -1);
TEST("2.3pre1", "2.3q", -1);
(-1 = less, 0 = equal, 1 = greater)
* A new verbosity level `lvlInfo', between `lvlError' and `lvlTalkative'. This is
the default for `nix-env', so without any `-v' flags users should get useful
output, e.g.,
$ nix-env -u foo.nix strategoxt
upgrading `strategoxt-0.9.2' to `strategoxt-0.9.3'
turned out to be a huge performance bottleneck (the text to printed
would always be evaluated, even when it was above the verbosity
level). This reduces fix-ng execution time by over 50%.
gprof(1) is very useful. :-)
The ATerm library doesn't search the heap for pointers to ATerms
when garbage collecting. As a result, C++ containers such as
`map<ATerm, ATerm>' will cause pointer to be hidden from the garbage
collector, causing crashes. Instead, we now use ATermTables.
writes stdout/stderr of the builder to ${prefix}/var/log/nix/x,
where x is the file name of the derivation expression, e.g.,
/nix/var/log/nix/54256391624be04fcb426048ae3ea0a4-d-pan-0.14.2.nix
Note that consecutive builds of the same expression overwrite,
rather than append to, existing log files.
* Fixed a segfault caused by the buffering of stderr.
* Fix now allows the specification of the full output path. This
should be used with great care, since it by-passes the normal hash
generation.
* Incremented the version number to 0.4 (prerelease).
log on commit. This means that there is a small change that some
transactions may be rolled back in case of a system crash, but this
should not be a problem (it merely might cause some expression
realisations to be rolled back), and it vastly improves performance.
* Upgraded to ATerm 2.0.5 (which also includes Armijn's 64-bit
patches).
* Point $HOME to a non-existing path when building to prevent certain tools (such as
wget) from falling back on /etc/passwd to locate the home directory (which we
don't want them to look at since it's not declared as an input).
keys to reference slice elements, e.g.,
Slice(["1ef7..."], [("/nix/store/1ef7...-foo", "1ef7", ["8c99..."]), ...])
This was wrong, since ids represent contents, not locations. Therefore we
now have:
Slice(["/nix/store/1ef7..."], [("/nix/store/1ef7...-foo", "1ef7", ["/nix/store/8c99-..."]), ...])
* Fix a bug in the computation of slice closures that could cause slice
elements to be duplicated.
("srcs", [Relative("foo/bar.c"), Relative("foo/baz.h")])
The result is an environment variable that contains the path names of the
inputs separated by spaces (so this is not safe for values containing
spaces).
builder using the `args' binding:
("args", ["bla", True, IncludeFix("aterm/aterm.fix")])
Note that packages can also be declared as inputs by specifying them
in the argument list.
process is already holding a lock on a path, it may acquire the lock
again without blocking or failing). (This might be dangerous, not
sure). Necessary for fast builds to work.
normal form in a single transaction to ensure that if we crash,
either everything is registered or nothing is. This is for
recoverability: unregistered paths in the store can be deleted
arbitrarily, while registered paths can only be deleted by running
the garbage collector.
* Open all database tables (Db objects) at initialisation time, not
every time they are used. This is necessary because tables have to
outlive all transactions that refer to them.
Renamed `fstateRefs' to `fstateRequisites'. The semantics of this
function is that it returns a list of all paths necessary to realise
a given expression. For a derive expression, this is the union of
requisites of the inputs; for a slice expression, it is the path of
each element in the slice. Also included are the paths of the
expressions themselves. Optionally, one can also include the
requisites of successor expressions (to recycle intermediate
results).
* `nix-switch' now distinguishes between an expression and its normal
form. Usually, only the normal form is registered as a root of the
garbage collector. With the `--source-root' flag, it will also
register the original expression as a root.
* `nix-collect-garbage' now has a flag `--keep-successors' which
causes successors not to be included in the list of garbage paths.
* `nix-collect-garbage' now has a flag `--invert' which will print all
paths that should *not* be garbage collected.
up to the given verbosity levels. These currently are:
lvlError = 0,
lvlNormal = 5,
lvlDebug = 10,
lvlDebugMore = 15
although only lvlError and lvlDebug are actually used right now.
substituting for (obvious, really).
* For greater efficiency, nix-pull/unnar will place the output in a
path that is probably the same as what is actually needed, thus
preventing a path copy.
* Even if a output id is given in a Fix package expression, ensure
that the resulting Nix derive expression has a different id. This
is because Nix expressions that are semantically equivalent (i.e.,
build the same result) might be different w.r.t. efficiency or
divergence. It is absolutely vital for the substitute mechanism
that such expressions are not used interchangeably.
value; this potentially dangerous feature enables better
sharing for those paths for which the content is known in
advance (e.g., because a content hash is given).
* Fast builds: if we can expand all output paths of a derive
expression, we don't have to build.
* A function to find all Nix expressions whose output ids are
completely contained in some set. Useful for uploading relevant Nix
expressions to a shared cache.
number of bytes, e.g., in case of a signal like SIGSTOP.
This caused `nix --dump' to fail sometimes.
Note that this bug went unnoticed because the call to `nix
--dump' is in a pipeline, and the shell ignores non-zero
exit codes from all but the last element in the pipeline.
Is there any way to check the result of the initial elements
in the pipeline? (In other words, is it at all possible to
write reliable shell scripts?)
input path is referenced in an output paths, we also have to
add all ids referenced by that input path.
* Better debug assertions to catch these sorts of errors.
This is not entirely trivial since this introduces the possibility
of mutual recursion.
* Made normal forms self-contained.
* Use unique ids, not content hashes, for content referencing.
Unifying substitutes and successors isn't very feasible for now,
since substitutes are only used when no path with a certain is
known. Therefore, a normal form of some expression stored as a
substitute would not be used unless the expression itself was
missing.
hash for which no local expansion is available, Nix can execute a
`substitute' which should produce a path with such a hash.
This is policy-free since Nix does not in any way specify how the
substitute should work, i.e., it's an arbitrary (unnormalised)
fstate expression. For example, `nix-pull' registers substitutes
that fetch Nix archives from the network (through `wget') and unpack
them, but any other method is possible as well. This is an
improvement over the old Nix sharing scheme, which had a policy
(fetching through `wget') built in.
The sharing scheme doesn't work completely yet because successors
from fstate rewriting have to be registered on the receiving side.
Probably the whole successor stuff can be folded up into the
substitute mechanism; this would be a nice simplification.
archives (using the package in corepkgs/nar).
* queryPathByHash -> expandHash, and it takes an argument specifying
the target path (which may be empty).
* Install the core Fix packages in $prefix/share/fix. TODO: bootstrap
Nix and install Nix as a Fix package.
a mapping from the hash to a url has been registered through `nix
regurl'.
* Bug fix in nix: don't pollute stdout when running tar, it made
nix-switch barf.
* Bug fix in nix-push-prebuilts: don't create a subdirectory on the
target when rsync'ing.
sharing package directories (i.e., the result of building a Nix
descriptor).
`nix-pull-prebuilts' obtains a list of all known prebuilts by
consulting the paths and URLs specified in
$prefix/etc/nix/prebuilts.conf. The mappings ($pkghash,
$prebuilthash) and ($prebuilthash, $location) are registered with
Nix so that it can use the prebuilt with hash $prebuilthash when
installing a package with hash $pkghash by downloading and unpacking
$location.
`nix-push-prebuilts' creates prebuilts for all packages for which no
prebuilt is known to exist. It can then optionally upload these
to the network through rsync.
`nix-[pull|push]-prebuilts' just provide a policy. Nix provides the
mechanism through the `nix [export|regprebuilt|regurl]' commands.
* Conditionals and variables in Fix expressions. This allows, e.g.,
Descr(
[ Bind("pkgId", "subversion-0.21.0")
, Bind("httpsClient", Bool(True))
, Bind("httpServer", Bool(True))
, Bind("ssl", If(Var("httpsClient"), Fix("./openssl-0.9.7b.fix"), ""))
, Bind("httpd", If(Var("httpServer"), Fix("./httpd-2.0.45.fix"), ""))
...
])
which introduces domain feature variables httpsClient and httpServer
(i.e., whether Subversion is built with https client and webdav
server support); the values of the variables influences package
dependencies and the build scripts.
The next step is to allow that packages can express constraints on
each other. E.g., StrategoXT is dependent on an ATerm library with
the "gcc" variant enabled. In fact, this may cause several
Nix instantiations to be created from a single Fix descriptor. If
possible, Fix should try to find the least set of instantiations
that obeys the constraints.
descriptors generated out of Fix descriptors specified on the
command line. This allows us to say:
nix-switch $(fix -i ./test/fixdescriptors/system.fix)
build action for `system' packages (like system.fix) that have
dependencies on all packages we want to activate.
So the command sequence to switch to a new activation configuration
of the system would be:
$ fix -i .../fixdescriptors/system.fix
...
system.fix -> 89cf4713b37cc66989304abeb9ea189f
$ nix-switch 89cf4713b37cc66989304abeb9ea189f
* A nix-profile.sh script that can be included in .bashrc.
packages (i.e., the packages that should appear in the user's $PATH,
and so on). Based on this list, the script nix-populate creates a
hierarchy of symlinks to the relevant files in those packages (e.g.,
for pkg/bin and pkg/lib).
A nice property of nix-populate is that on each run it creates a
*new* tree, rather than updating the old one. It then atomically
switches over to the new tree. This allows atomic upgrades or
rollbacks on the set of activated packages.
* Command `nix ensure' which is like `nix getpkg' except that if the
has refers to a run action it will just ensure that the imports are
there.
* Command `nix closure' to print out the closure of the set of
descriptors under the import relation, starting at a set of roots.
This can be used for garbage collection (e.g., given a list of
`activated' packages, we can delete all packages not reachable from
those).
* Command `nix graph' to print out a Dot graph of the dependency
graph.
* `nix-addroot' adds a root for the (unimplemented) garbage collector.
action. Run actions are described by uniquely hashed descriptors,
just like build actions. Therefore run actions can have
dependencies, but these need not be the same as the build time
dependencies (e.g., at runtime we can link against a different
version of a dynamic library). Example:
nix run 31d6bf4c171282367065e0deecd7c579
will run the Pan 0.13.91 newsreader with gtkspell support.
descriptor templates under the import relation. I.e., we can now
say:
nix-instantiate outdir foo.nix
which will create descriptors for foo.nix and all imported packages
in outdir/.
files) are now referenced using their cryptographic hashes.
This ensures that if two package descriptors have the same contents,
then they describe the same package. This property is not as
trivial as it sounds: generally import relations cause this property
not to hold w.r.t. temporality. But since imports also use hashes
to reference other packages, equality follows by induction.
