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/
```
In this mode, the following restrictions apply:
* The builtins currentTime, currentSystem and storePath throw an
error.
* $NIX_PATH and -I are ignored.
* fetchGit and fetchMercurial require a revision hash.
* fetchurl and fetchTarball require a sha256 attribute.
* No file system access is allowed outside of the paths returned by
fetch{Git,Mercurial,url,Tarball}. Thus 'nix build -f ./foo.nix' is
not allowed.
Thus, the evaluation result is completely reproducible from the
command line arguments. E.g.
nix build --pure-eval '(
let
nix = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; rev = "9c927de4b179a6dd210dd88d34bda8af4b575680"; };
nixpkgs = fetchGit { url = https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git; ref = "release-17.09"; rev = "66b4de79e3841530e6d9c6baf98702aa1f7124e4"; };
in (import (nix + "/release.nix") { inherit nix nixpkgs; }).build.x86_64-linux
)'
The goal is to enable completely reproducible and traceable
evaluation. For example, a NixOS configuration could be fully
described by a single Git commit hash. 'nixos-rebuild' would do
something like
nix build --pure-eval '(
(import (fetchGit { url = file:///my-nixos-config; rev = "..."; })).system
')
where the Git repository /my-nixos-config would use further fetchGit
calls or Git externals to fetch Nixpkgs and whatever other
dependencies it has. Either way, the commit hash would uniquely
identify the NixOS configuration and allow it to reproduced.