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5 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Eelco Dolstra df552a2645 nix eval: Add option to write a directory
This is useful for generating the nix manpages, but it may have other
applications (like generating configuration files without a Nix store).
2020-12-02 23:23:23 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra ca8caaec5e nix: Add --expr flag
This replaces the '(...)' installable syntax, which is not very
discoverable. The downside is that you can't have multiple expressions
or mix expressions and other installables.
2019-11-27 00:05:30 +01:00
Eelco Dolstra ee1254d4f5 nix: Add --impure as a shorter alias of --no-pure-eval 2019-04-08 23:19:19 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra d2875f6782 Fix tests 2019-04-08 16:11:36 +02:00
Eelco Dolstra d4dcffd643
Add pure evaluation mode
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.
2018-01-16 19:23:18 +01:00