* document the store concept and its purpose
reword the glossary to link to more existing information instead of
repeating it.
move the store documentation to the top of the table of contents, in
front of the Nix language. this will provide a natural place to
document other aspects of the store as well as the various store types.
move the package management section after the Nix language and before
Advanced Topics to follow the pattern to layer more complex concepts on
top of each other.
this structure of the manual will also nudge beginners to learn Nix
bottom-up and hopefully make more likely that they understand underlying
concepts first before delving into complex use cases that may or may not
be easy to implement with what's currently there.
[John adds this note] The sort of beginner who likes to dive straight into reference documentation should prefer this approach. Conversely, the sort of beginner who would prefer the opposite top-down approach of trying to solve problems before they understand everything that is going on is better off reading other tutorial/guide material anyways, and will just "random-access" the reference manual as a last resort. For such random-access the order doesn't matter, so this restructure doesn't make them any worse off.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
Rather than having a misc tutorial page in the grab-bag "package management" section, this information should just be part of the S3 store docs.
---------
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems>
Single quotes are a basic feature of shell syntax that people expect to
work. They are also more convenient for writing literal code expressions
with less escaping.
this is the first thing most beginners see, and it misleads them into
assuming `nix-env` is appropriate for doing anything but setting and
reverting profile generations.
this chapter is the root of most evil around the ecosystem, and today we
finally close it for good.
* docker: publish images to ghcr.io
docker.com announced their intention to remove the free plan used by
OSS. The nixos/nix image is essential to various CI runs to build with
nix. To provide a continuity plan, this commit pushes the image to
ghcr.io as well.
Co-authored-by: Sandro <sandro.jaeckel@gmail.com>
Add a new experimental `impure-env` setting that is a key-value list of
environment variables to inject into FOD derivations that specify the
corresponding `impureEnvVars`.
This allows clients to make use of this feature (without having to change the
environment of the daemon itself) and might eventually deprecate the current
behaviour (pick whatever is in the environment of the daemon) as it's more
principled and might prevent information leakage.
For people working on Nix with `nix develop`, it's better to just use
`autoreconfPhase` and `configurePhase`, which is standard Nixpkgs / nix
shell make from Nixpkgs practice --- it is good to emphasize the degree
to which Nix is *just* a regular C++ project which can be worked on in
the regular way.
(For people running `nix-shell`, the story is similar, except
`configurePhase` would use non-writable store paths, which matters for
hte times we use output paths before `make install`, so I kept the
existing `./configure ...` instruction.)
For people building Nix without Nix (e.g. packaging it for another
distro) they also don't need `bootstrap.sh`, and can just run
`autoreconf -vfi` directly. (More likely, they have their own idioms to
do this just as we have `autoreconfPhase`.)
I was sleepy and confused that "interpolated expression" was a new type of thing at first. This nudges the reader to understand that its just a regular expression, and these conditions are imposed by the interpolation operation.
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 #4770 I implemented proper `nix-shell(1)` support for derivations
using `__structuredAttrs = true;`. Back then we decided to introduce two
new environment variables, `NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE` for `.attrs.sh` and
`NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE` for `.attrs.json`. This was to avoid having to
copy these files to `$NIX_BUILD_TOP` in a `nix-shell(1)` session which
effectively meant copying these files to the project dir without
cleaning up afterwords[1].
On last NixCon I resumed hacking on `__structuredAttrs = true;` by
default for `nixpkgs` with a few other folks and getting back to it,
I identified a few problems with the how it's used in `nixpkgs`:
* A lot of builders in `nixpkgs` don't care about the env vars and
assume that `.attrs.sh` and `.attrs.json` are in `$NIX_BUILD_TOP`.
The sole reason why this works is that `nix-shell(1)` sources
the contents of `.attrs.sh` and then sources `$stdenv/setup` if it
exists. This may not be pretty, but it mostly works. One notable
difference when using nixpkgs' stdenv as of now is however that
`$__structuredAttrs` is set to `1` on regular builds, but set to
an empty string in a shell session.
Also, `.attrs.json` cannot be used in shell sessions because
it can only be accessed by `$NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE` and not by
`$NIX_BUILD_TOP/.attrs.json`.
I considered changing Nix to be compatible with what nixpkgs
effectively does, but then we'd have to either move $NIX_BUILD_TOP for
shell sessions to a temporary location (and thus breaking a lot of
assumptions) or we'd reintroduce all the problems we solved back then
by using these two env vars.
This is partly because I didn't document these variables back
then (mea culpa), so I decided to drop all mentions of
`.attrs.{json,sh}` in the manual and only refer to `$NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE`
and `$NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE`. The same applies to all our integration tests.
Theoretically we could deprecated using `"$NIX_BUILD_TOP"/.attrs.sh` in
the future now.
* `nix develop` and `nix print-dev-env` don't support this environment
variable at all even though they're supposed to be part of the replacement
for `nix-shell` - for the drv debugging part to be precise.
This isn't a big deal for the vast majority of derivations, i.e.
derivations relying on nixpkgs' `stdenv` wiring things together
properly. This is because `nix develop` effectively "clones" the
derivation and replaces the builder with a script that dumps all of
the environment, shell variables, functions etc, so the state of
structured attrs being "sourced" is transmitted into the dev shell and
most of the time you don't need to worry about `.attrs.sh` not
existing because the shell is correctly configured and the
if [ -e .attrs.sh ]; then source .attrs.sh; fi
is simply omitted.
However, this will break when having a derivation that reads e.g. from
`.attrs.json` like
with import <nixpkgs> {};
runCommand "foo" { __structuredAttrs = true; foo.bar = 23; } ''
cat $NIX_ATTRS_JSON_FILE # doesn't work because it points to /build/.attrs.json
''
To work around this I employed a similar approach as it exists for
`nix-shell`: the `NIX_ATTRS_{JSON,SH}_FILE` vars are replaced with
temporary locations.
The contents of `.attrs.sh` and `.attrs.json` are now written into the
JSON by `get-env.sh`, the builder that `nix develop` injects into the
derivation it's debugging. So finally the exact file contents are
present and exported by `nix develop`.
I also made `.attrs.json` a JSON string in the JSON printed by
`get-env.sh` on purpose because then it's not necessary to serialize
the object structure again. `nix develop` only needs the JSON
as string because it's only written into the temporary file.
I'm not entirely sure if it makes sense to also use a temporary
location for `nix print-dev-env` (rather than just skipping the
rewrite in there), but this would probably break certain cases where
it's relied upon `$NIX_ATTRS_SH_FILE` to exist (prime example are the
`nix print-dev-env` test-cases I wrote in this patch using
`tests/shell.nix`, these would fail because the env var exists, but it
cannot read from it).
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4770#issuecomment-836799719
* document "Import From Derivation"
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <git@JohnEricson.me>
make the example more realistic, since `headers` is not an output name
used in Nixpkgs
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
derivations are about data transformation, so the term "build" does not
add any information. there was also some feedback that "build task" is
not more helpful than "derivation" if you have no prior experience with
Nix or build systems, while existing associations may be misleading.
Was confused why `make html` didn't work while working on #9032, but
then I realized that after this section was written, the target was
renamed to `manual-html` in 6910f5dcb6.
there is a very confusing warning in the Nixpkgs manual that
mischaracterises `nix-env` behavior, and this example shows what's
really happening.
note that it doesn't use `pkgs.runCommand` or other `pkgs.stdenv`
facilities, as deep down those set `meta.outputsToInstall` to very
particular defaults that do not generally apply to Nix.
We use the same nested map representation we used for goals, again in
order to save space. We might someday want to combine with `inputDrvs`,
by doing `V = bool` instead of `V = std::set<OutputName>`, but we are
not doing that yet for sake of a smaller diff.
The ATerm format for Derivations also needs to be extended, in addition
to the in-memory format. To accomodate this, we added a new basic
versioning scheme, so old versions of Nix will get nice errors. (And
going forward, if the ATerm format changes again the errors will be even
better.)
`parsedStrings`, an internal function used as part of parsing
derivations in A-Term format, used to consume the final `]` but expect
the initial `[` to already be consumed. This made for what looked like
unbalanced brackets at callsites, which was confusing. Now it consumes
both which is hopefully less confusing.
As part of testing, we also created a unit test for the A-Term format for
regular non-experimental derivations too.
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
Apply suggestions from code review
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
this is a pure reformatting, contents were not changed
one sentence per line makes reviewing diffs and making suggestions much
more convenient. the indentation was an artifat of the DocBook
migration.
Continue with the characterization testing idioms begun in
c70484454f, but this time for unit tests.
Co-authored-by: Andreas Rammhold <andreas@rammhold.de>
Robert Hensing
Maximilian Bosch
Ilan Joselevich