The current behaviour modifies the first writeable file from amongst
.bash_profile, .bash_login and .profile. So .bash_profile (if it is
writable) would be modified even if a user has already sourced nix.sh
in, say, .profile.
This commit introduces a new environment variable,
NIX_INSTALLER_NO_MODIFY_PROFILE. If this is set during installation,
then the modifications are unconditionally skipped.
This is useful for users who have a manually curated set of dotfiles
that they are porting to a new machine. In such scenarios, nix.sh is
already sourced at a place where the user prefers. Without this
change, the nix installer would insist on modifying .bash_profile if
it exists.
This commit also add documentations for both the current behaviour and
the new override.
Currently, man has issues finding man pages for Nix-installed
application (also, `nix-env --help` doesn't work). The issue is caused
by custom `$MANPATH` set by my system. That makes man use it instead of
searching in default location.
Either of next lines workaround the issue:
```sh
unset MANPATH
export MANPATH=$HOME/.nix-profile/share/man:$MANPATH
```
This patch adds the later line to the `nix-profile.sh` if user has
`MANPATH` set. (Not clearing `MANPATH` as that would be disrespect of
user's preferences.)
As a side-effect, host's man might find man pages installed by Nix.
This is primarily to subsume the functionality of the
copy-from-other-stores substituter. For example, in the NixOS
installer, we can now do (assuming we're in the target chroot, and the
Nix store of the installation CD is bind-mounted on /tmp/nix):
$ nix-build ... --option substituters 'local?state=/tmp/nix/var&real=/tmp/nix/store'
However, unlike copy-from-other-stores, this also allows write access
to such a store. One application might be fetching substitutes for
/nix/store in a situation where the user doesn't have sufficient
privileges to create /nix, e.g.:
$ NIX_REMOTE="local?state=/home/alice/nix/var&real=/home/alice/nix/store" nix-build ...
Nix sometimes outputs a warning message like this:
```
directory /nix does not exist; creating it by running ‘?? using sudo
```
... when it really meant to output something that looked like this:
```
directory /nix does not exist; creating it by running 'mkdir -m 0755 /nix && chown gabriel /nix' using sudo
```
The reason why is due to some bizarre behavior in Bash where it will translate anything of the form `$x’` to `??`, leading to the incorrect warning message. I don't know what is the origin of this Bash behavior, but the easiest fix is to just use ASCII quotes instead of unicode quotes.
Jörg Thalheim
