Commit graph

2 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
John Ericson 68c81c7375 Put functional tests in tests/functional
I think it is bad for these reasons when `tests/` contains a mix of
functional and integration tests

 - Concepts is harder to understand, the documentation makes a good
   unit vs functional vs integration distinction, but when the
   integration tests are just two subdirs within `tests/` this is not
   clear.

 - Source filtering in the `flake.nix` is more complex. We need to
   filter out some of the dirs from `tests/`, rather than simply pick
   the dirs we want and take all of them. This is a good sign the
   structure of what we are trying to do is not matching the structure
   of the files.

With this change we have a clean:
```shell-session
$ git show 'HEAD:tests'
tree HEAD:tests

functional/
installer/
nixos/
```
2023-10-06 09:05:56 -04:00
Eelco Dolstra c273c15cb1 Add primop ‘scopedImport’
‘scopedImport’ works like ‘import’, except that it takes a set of
attributes to be added to the lexical scope of the expression,
essentially extending or overriding the builtin variables.  For
instance, the expression

  scopedImport { x = 1; } ./foo.nix

where foo.nix contains ‘x’, will evaluate to 1.

This has a few applications:

* It allows getting rid of function argument specifications in package
  expressions. For instance, a package expression like:

    { stdenv, fetchurl, libfoo }:

    stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }

  can now we written as just

    stdenv.mkDerivation { ... buildInputs = [ libfoo ]; }

  and imported in all-packages.nix as:

    bar = scopedImport pkgs ./bar.nix;

  So whereas we once had dependencies listed in three places
  (buildInputs, the function, and the call site), they now only need
  to appear in one place.

* It allows overriding builtin functions. For instance, to trace all
  calls to ‘map’:

  let
    overrides = {
      map = f: xs: builtins.trace "map called!" (map f xs);

      # Ensure that our override gets propagated by calls to
      # import/scopedImport.
      import = fn: scopedImport overrides fn;

      scopedImport = attrs: fn: scopedImport (overrides // attrs) fn;

      # Also update ‘builtins’.
      builtins = builtins // overrides;
    };
  in scopedImport overrides ./bla.nix

* Similarly, it allows extending the set of builtin functions. For
  instance, during Nixpkgs/NixOS evaluation, the Nixpkgs library
  functions could be added to the default scope.

There is a downside: calls to scopedImport are not memoized, unlike
import. So importing a file multiple times leads to multiple parsings
/ evaluations. It would be possible to construct the AST only once,
but that would require careful handling of variables/environments.
2014-05-26 14:26:29 +02:00