In particular, we store whether an attribute failed to evaluate (threw
an exception) or was an unsupported type. This is to ensure that a
repeated 'nix flake show' never has to evaluate anything, so it can
execute without fetching the flake.
With this, 'nix flake show nixpkgs/nixos-20.03 --legacy' executes in
0.6s (was 3.4s).
This speeds up the creation of the cache for the nixpkgs flake from
21.2s to 10.2s. Oddly, it also speeds up querying the cache
(i.e. running 'nix flake show nixpkgs/nixos-20.03 --legacy') from 4.2s
to 3.4s.
(For comparison, running with --no-eval-cache takes 9.5s, so the
overhead of building the SQLite cache is only 0.7s.)
In the fully cached case for the 'nixpkgs' flake, it went from 101s to
4.6s. Populating the cache went from 132s to 17.4s (which could
probably be improved further by combining INSERTs).
Future editions of flakes or the Nix language can be supported by
renaming flake.nix (e.g. flake-v2.nix). This avoids a bootstrap
problem where we don't know which grammar to use to parse
flake*.nix. It also allows a project to support multiple flake
editions, in theory.
This is useful for finding out what a registry lookup resolves to, e.g
$ nix flake info patchelf
Resolved URL: github:NixOS/patchelf
Locked URL: github:NixOS/patchelf/cd7955af31698c571c30b7a0f78e59fd624d0229
One application for this is pinning the 'nixpkgs' flake to the exact
revision used to build the NixOS system, e.g.
{
"flakes": [
{
"from": {
"id": "nixpkgs",
"type": "indirect"
},
"to": {
"owner": "NixOS",
"repo": "nixpkgs",
"type": "github",
"rev": "b0c285807d6a9f1b7562ec417c24fa1a30ecc31a"
}
}
],
"version": 2
}
This copies a flake and all its inputs recursively to a store (e.g. a
binary cache). This is intended to enable long-term reproducibility
for flakes. However this will also require #3253.
Example:
$ nix flake archive --json --to file:///tmp/my-cache nixops
{"path":"/nix/store/272igzkgl1gdzmabsjvb2kb2zqbphb3p-source","inputs":{"nixops-aws":{"path":"/nix/store/ybcykw13gr7iq1pzg18iyibbcv8k9q1v-source","inputs":{}},"nixops-hetzner":{"path":"/nix/store/6yn0205x3nz55w8ms3335p2841javz2d-source","inputs":{}},"nixpkgs":{"path":"/nix/store/li3lkr2ajrzphqqz3jj2avndnyd3i5lc-source","inputs":{}}}}
$ ll /tmp/my-cache
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 eelco users 403 Jan 30 01:01 272igzkgl1gdzmabsjvb2kb2zqbphb3p.narinfo
-rw-r--r-- 1 eelco users 403 Jan 30 01:01 6yn0205x3nz55w8ms3335p2841javz2d.narinfo
-rw-r--r-- 1 eelco users 408 Jan 30 01:01 li3lkr2ajrzphqqz3jj2avndnyd3i5lc.narinfo
drwxr-xr-x 2 eelco users 6 Jan 30 01:01 nar
-rw-r--r-- 1 eelco users 21 Jan 30 01:01 nix-cache-info
-rw-r--r-- 1 eelco users 404 Jan 30 01:01 ybcykw13gr7iq1pzg18iyibbcv8k9q1v.narinfo
Fixes#3336.
Added a flag --no-update-lock-file to barf if the lock file needs any
changes. This is useful for CI systems if you're building a
checkout. Fixes#2947.
Renamed --no-save-lock-file to --no-write-lock-file. It is now a fatal
error if the lock file needs changes but --no-write-lock-file is not
given.
E.g.
$ nix flake update ~/Misc/eelco-configurations/hagbard \
--override-input 'dwarffs/nixpkgs' ../my-nixpkgs
overrides the 'nixpkgs' input of the 'dwarffs' input of the top-level
flake.
Fixes#2837.
A command like
$ nix run nixpkgs#hello
will now build the attribute 'packages.${system}.hello' rather than
'packages.hello'. Note that this does mean that the flake needs to
export an attribute for every system type it supports, and you can't
build on unsupported systems. So 'packages' typically looks like this:
packages = nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs ["x86_64-linux" "i686-linux"] (system: {
hello = ...;
});
The 'checks', 'defaultPackage', 'devShell', 'apps' and 'defaultApp'
outputs similarly are now attrsets that map system types to
derivations/apps. 'nix flake check' checks that the derivations for
all platforms evaluate correctly, but only builds the derivations in
'checks.${system}'.
Fixes#2861. (That issue also talks about access to ~/.config/nixpkgs
and --arg, but I think it's reasonable to say that flakes shouldn't
support those.)
The alternative to attribute selection is to pass the system type as
an argument to the flake's 'outputs' function, e.g. 'outputs = { self,
nixpkgs, system }: ...'. However, that approach would be at odds with
hermetic evaluation and make it impossible to enumerate the packages
provided by a flake.
