When working on some more complex Nix code, there are sometimes rather
unhelpful or misleading error messages, especially if coerce-errors are
thrown.
This patch is a first steps towards improving that. I'm happy to file
more changes after that, but I'd like to gather some feedback first.
To summarize, this patch does the following things:
* Attrsets (a.k.a. `Bindings` in `libexpr`) now have a `Pos`. This is
helpful e.g. to identify which attribute-set in `listToAttrs` is
invalid.
* The `Value`-struct has a new method named `determinePos` which tries
to guess the position of a value and falls back to a default if that's
not possible.
This can be used to provide better messages if a coercion fails.
* The new `determinePos`-API is used by `builtins.concatMap` now. With
that change, Nix shows the exact position in the error where a wrong
value was returned by the lambda.
To make sure it's still obvious that `concatMap` is the problem,
another stack-frame was added.
* The changes described above can be added to every other `primop`, but
first I'd like to get some feedback about the overall approach.
Changes:
* The divider lines are gone. These were in practice a bit confusing,
in particular with --show-trace or --keep-going, since then there
were multiple lines, suggesting a start/end which wasn't the case.
* Instead, multi-line error messages are now indented to align with
the prefix (e.g. "error: ").
* The 'description' field is gone since we weren't really using it.
* 'hint' is renamed to 'msg' since it really wasn't a hint.
* The error is now printed *before* the location info.
* The 'name' field is no longer printed since most of the time it
wasn't very useful since it was just the name of the exception (like
EvalError). Ideally in the future this would be a unique, easily
googleable error ID (like rustc).
* "trace:" is now just "…". This assumes error contexts start with
something like "while doing X".
Example before:
error: --- AssertionError ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- nix
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
assertion 'false' failed
----------------------------------------------------- show-trace -----------------------------------------------------
trace: while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
Example after:
error: assertion 'false' failed
at: (7:7) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/applications/misc/hello/default.nix
6|
7| x = assert false; 1;
| ^
8|
… while evaluating the attribute 'x' of the derivation 'hello-2.10'
at: (192:11) in file: /home/eelco/Dev/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix
191| // (lib.optionalAttrs (!(attrs ? name) && attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)) {
192| name = "${attrs.pname}-${attrs.version}";
| ^
193| } // (lib.optionalAttrs (stdenv.hostPlatform != stdenv.buildPlatform && !dontAddHostSuffix && (attrs ? name || (attrs ? pname && attrs ? version)))) {
`nix flake info` calls the github 'commits' API, which requires
authorization when the repository is private. Currently this request
fails with a 404.
This commit adds an authorization header when calling the 'commits' API.
It also changes the way that the 'tarball' API authenticates, moving the
user's token from a query parameter into the Authorization header.
The query parameter method is recently deprecated and will be disallowed
in November 2020. Using them today triggers a warning email.
The attributes previously stored in TreeInfo (narHash, revCount,
lastModified) are now stored in Input. This makes it less arbitrary
what attributes are stored where.
As a result, the lock file format has changed. An entry like
"info": {
"lastModified": 1585405475,
"narHash": "sha256-bESW0n4KgPmZ0luxvwJ+UyATrC6iIltVCsGdLiphVeE="
},
"locked": {
"owner": "NixOS",
"repo": "nixpkgs",
"rev": "b88ff468e9850410070d4e0ccd68c7011f15b2be",
"type": "github"
},
is now stored as
"locked": {
"owner": "NixOS",
"repo": "nixpkgs",
"rev": "b88ff468e9850410070d4e0ccd68c7011f15b2be",
"type": "github",
"lastModified": 1585405475,
"narHash": "sha256-bESW0n4KgPmZ0luxvwJ+UyATrC6iIltVCsGdLiphVeE="
},
The 'Input' class is now a dumb set of attributes. All the fetcher
implementations subclass InputScheme, not Input. This simplifies the
API.
Also, fix substitution of flake inputs. This was broken since lazy
flake fetching started using fetchTree internally.
This provides a pluggable mechanism for defining new fetchers. It adds
a builtin function 'fetchTree' that generalizes existing fetchers like
'fetchGit', 'fetchMercurial' and 'fetchTarball'. 'fetchTree' takes a
set of attributes, e.g.
fetchTree {
type = "git";
url = "https://example.org/repo.git";
ref = "some-branch";
rev = "abcdef...";
}
The existing fetchers are just wrappers around this. Note that the
input attributes to fetchTree are the same as flake input
specifications and flake lock file entries.
All fetchers share a common cache stored in
~/.cache/nix/fetcher-cache-v1.sqlite. This replaces the ad hoc caching
mechanisms in fetchGit and download.cc (e.g. ~/.cache/nix/{tarballs,git-revs*}).
This also adds support for Git worktrees (c169ea5904).
This allows querying the location of function arguments. E.g.
builtins.unsafeGetAttrPos "x" (builtins.functionArgs ({ x }: null))
=> { column = 57; file = "/home/infinisil/src/nix/inst/test.nix"; line = 1; }
There is no termination condition for evaluation of cyclical
expression paths which can lead to infinite loops. This addresses
one spot in the parser in a similar fashion as utils.cc/canonPath
does.
This issue can be reproduced by something like:
```
ln -s a b
ln -s b a
nix-instantiate -E 'import ./a'
```
E.g.
$ nix-build '<nixpkgs>' -A hello --experimental-features no-url-literals
error: URL literals are disabled, at /nix/store/vsjamkzh15r3c779q2711az826hqgvzr-nixpkgs-20.03pre194957.bef773ed53f/nixpkgs/pkgs/top-level/all-packages.nix:1236:11
Helps with implementing https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/45.
Maximilian Bosch
