As long as the flake input is locked, it is now only fetched when it
is evaluated (e.g. "nixpkgs" is fetched when
"inputs.nixpkgs.<something>" is evaluated).
This required adding an "id" attribute to the members of "inputs" in
lockfiles, e.g.
"inputs": {
"nixpkgs/release-19.03": {
"id": "nixpkgs",
"inputs": {},
"narHash": "sha256-eYtxncIMFVmOHaHBtTdPGcs/AnJqKqA6tHCm0UmPYQU=",
"nonFlakeInputs": {},
"uri": "github:edolstra/nixpkgs/e9d5882bb861dc48f8d46960e7c820efdbe8f9c1"
}
}
because the flake ID needs to be known beforehand to construct the
"inputs" attrset.
Fixes#2913.
This is primarily useful for version string generation, where we need
a monotonically increasing number. The revcount is the preferred thing
to use, but isn't available for GitHub flakes (since it requires
fetching the entire history). The last commit timestamp OTOH can be
extracted from GitHub tarballs.
This ensures that flakes don't get garbage-collected, which is
important to get nix-channel-like behaviour.
For example, running
$ nix build hydra:
will create a GC root
~/.cache/nix/flake-closures/hydra -> /nix/store/xarfiqcwa4w8r4qpz1a769xxs8c3phgn-flake-closure
where the contents/references of the linked file in the store are the
flake source trees used by the 'hydra' flake:
/nix/store/n6d5f5lkpfjbmkyby0nlg8y1wbkmbc7i-source
/nix/store/vbkg4zy1qd29fnhflsv9k2j9jnbqd5m2-source
/nix/store/z46xni7d47s5wk694359mq9ay353ar94-source
Note that this in itself is not enough to allow offline use; the
fetcher for the flakeref (e.g. fetchGit or downloadCached) must not
fail if it cannot fetch the latest version of the file, so long as it
knows a cached version.
Issue #2868.
This PR was not intended to be merged until those tests were actually
passing. So disable them for now to unbreak the flakes branch.
https://hydra.nixos.org/eval/1519271
I.e. flake3 depends on flake2 which depends on flake1. Currently this
fails with
error: indirect flake reference 'flake1' is not allowed
because we're not propagating lockfiles downwards properly.
For text files it is possible to do it like so:
`builtins.hashString "sha256" (builtins.readFile /tmp/a)`
but that doesn't work for binary files.
With builtins.hashFile any kind of file can be conveniently hashed.
SRI hashes (https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/) combine the hash algorithm and
a base-64 hash. This allows more concise and standard hash
specifications. For example, instead of
import <nix/fetchurl.nl> {
url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
sha256 = "5d22dad058d5c800d65a115f919da22938c50dd6ba98c5e3a183172d149840a4";
};
you can write
import <nix/fetchurl.nl> {
url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
hash = "sha256-XSLa0FjVyADWWhFfkZ2iKTjFDda6mMXjoYMXLRSYQKQ=";
};
In fixed-output derivations, the outputHashAlgo is no longer mandatory
if outputHash specifies the hash (either as an SRI or in the old
"<type>:<hash>" format).
'nix hash-{file,path}' now print hashes in SRI format by default. I
also reverted them to use SHA-256 by default because that's what we're
using most of the time in Nixpkgs.
Suggested by @zimbatm.
Jonas Chevalier