(Linux) machines no longer maintain the atime because it's too
expensive, and on the machines where --use-atime is useful (like the
buildfarm), reading the atimes on the entire Nix store takes way too
much time to make it practical.
intersectAttrs returns the (right-biased) intersection between two
attribute sets, e.g. every attribute from the second set that also
exists in the first. functionArgs returns the set of attributes
expected by a function.
The main goal of these is to allow the elimination of most of
all-packages.nix. Most package instantiations in all-packages.nix
have this form:
foo = import ./foo.nix {
inherit a b c;
};
With intersectAttrs and functionArgs, this can be written as:
foo = callPackage (import ./foo.nix) { };
where
callPackage = f: args:
f ((builtins.intersectAttrs (builtins.functionArgs f) pkgs) // args);
I.e., foo.nix is called with all attributes from "pkgs" that it
actually needs (e.g., pkgs.a, pkgs.b and pkgs.c). (callPackage can
do any other generic package-level stuff we might want, such as
applying makeOverridable.) Of course, the automatically supplied
arguments can be overriden if needed, e.g.
foo = callPackage (import ./foo.nix) {
c = c_version_2;
};
but for the vast majority of packages, this won't be needed.
The advantages are to reduce the amount of typing needed to add a
dependency (from three sites to two), and to reduce the number of
trivial commits to all-packages.nix. For the former, there have
been two previous attempts:
- Use "args: with args;" in the package's function definition.
This however obscures the actual expected arguments of a
function, which is very bad.
- Use "{ arg1, arg2, ... }:" in the package's function definition
(i.e. use the ellipis "..." to allow arbitrary additional
arguments), and then call the function with all of "pkgs" as an
argument. But this inhibits error detection if you call it with
an misspelled (or obsolete) argument.
NixOS evaluation errors in particular look intimidating and
generally aren't very useful. Ideally the builtins.throw messages
should be self-contained.
UTC) rather than 0 (00:00:00). 1 is a better choice because some
programs use 0 as a special value. For instance, the Template
Toolkit uses a timestamp of 0 to denote the non-existence of a file,
so it barfs on files in the Nix store (see
template-toolkit-nix-store.patch in Nixpkgs). Similarly, Maya 2008
fails to load script directories with a timestamp of 0 and can't be
patched because it's closed source.
This will also shut up those "implausibly old time stamp" GNU tar
warnings.
attributes of the rec are in scope of `e'. This is useful in
expressions such as
rec {
lib = import ./lib;
inherit (lib) concatStrings;
}
It does change the semantics of expressions such as
let x = {y = 1;}; in rec { x = {y = 2;}; inherit (x) y; }.y
This now returns 2 instead of 1. However, no code in Nixpkgs or
NixOS seems to rely on the old behaviour.
shorthand for {x = {y = {z = ...;};};}. This is especially useful
for NixOS configuration files, e.g.
{
services = {
sshd = {
enable = true;
port = 2022;
};
};
}
can now be written as
{
services.sshd.enable = true;
services.sshd.port = 2022;
}
However, it is currently not permitted to write
{
services.sshd = {enable = true;};
services.sshd.port = 2022;
}
as this is considered a duplicate definition of `services.sshd'.
broken, but now the evaluator checks for it to prevent Nix
expressions from relying on undefined behaviour. Equality tests are
implemented using a shallow pointer equality test between ATerms.
However, because attribute sets are lazy and contain position
information, this can give false positives. For instance,
previously
let y = {x = 1;}; in y == y
evaluated to true, while the equivalent expression
{x = 1;} == {x = 1;}
evaluated to false. So disallow these tests for now. (Eventually
we may want to implement deep equality tests for attribute sets,
like lib.eqStrict.)
* Idem: disallow comparisons between functions.
* Implemented deep comparisons of lists. This had the same problem as
attribute sets - the elements in the list weren't evaluated. For
instance,
["xy"] == [("x" + "y")]
evaluated to false. Now it works properly.
(that is, call the build hook with a certain interval until it
accepts the build).
* build-remote.pl was totally broken: for all system types other than
the local system type, it would send all builds to the *first*
machine of the appropriate type.
poll for it (i.e. if we can't acquire the lock, then let the main
select() loop wait for at most a few seconds and then try again).
This improves parallelism: if two nix-store processes are both
trying to build a path at the same time, the second one shouldn't
block; it should first see if it can build other goals. Also, it
prevents the deadlocks that have been occuring in Hydra lately,
where a process waits for a lock held by another process that's
waiting for a lock held by the first.
The downside is that polling isn't really elegant, but POSIX doesn't
provide a way to wait for locks in a select() loop. The only
solution would be to spawn a thread for each lock to do a blocking
fcntl() and then signal the main thread, but that would require
pthreads.
