For convenience, you can now say
$ nix-env -f channel:nixos-16.03 -iA hello
instead of
$ nix-env -f https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-16.03/nixexprs.tar.xz -iA hello
Similarly,
$ nix-shell -I channel:nixpkgs-unstable -p hello
$ nix-build channel:nixos-15.09 -A hello
Abstracting over the NixOS/Nixpkgs channels location also allows us to
use a more efficient transport (e.g. Git) in the future.
Also, move a few free-standing functions into StoreAPI and Derivation.
Also, introduce a non-nullable smart pointer, ref<T>, which is just a
wrapper around std::shared_ptr ensuring that the pointer is never
null. (For reference-counted values, this is better than passing a
"T&", because the latter doesn't maintain the refcount. Usually, the
caller will have a shared_ptr keeping the value alive, but that's not
always the case, e.g., when passing a reference to a std::thread via
std::bind.)
This makes it consistent with the Nixpkgs fetchurl and makes it work
in chroots. We don't need verification because the hash of the result
is checked anyway.
This ensures that 1) the derivation doesn't change when Nix changes;
2) the derivation closure doesn't contain Nix and its dependencies; 3)
we don't have to rely on ugly chroot hacks.
