There's probably more that can be said, but I thought it might be helpful to put something here about how to access elements of a list for folks coming from more or less any other programming language. If this is rarely used, it might be nice to add to the documentation something about why it's rarely used.
how the different invocations relate to each other seems be
confusing, which is relatable because one has to wire it up in your head
while reading. an explicit reference should make it unambiguous and
easier to notice due to links being highlighted.
As discussed in the maintainer meeting on 2024-01-29.
Mainly this is to avoid a situation where the name is parsed and
treated as a file name, mostly to protect users.
.-* and ..-* are also considered invalid because they might strip
on that separator to remove versions. Doesn't really work, but that's
what we decided, and I won't argue with it, because .-* probably
doesn't seem to have a real world application anyway.
We do still permit a 1-character name that's just "-", which still
poses a similar risk in such a situation. We can't start disallowing
trailing -, because a non-zero number of users will need it and we've
seen how annoying and painful such a change is.
What matters most is preventing a situation where . or .. can be
injected, and to just get this done.
This extends the `error: cannot coerce a TYPE to a string` message
to print the value that could not be coerced. This helps with debugging
by making it easier to track down where the value is being produced
from, especially in errors with deep or unhelpful stack traces.
Do this if we want to do `--hash-algo` everywhere, and not `--algo` for
hash commands.
The new `nix hash convert` is updated. Deprecated new CLI commands are
left as-is (`nix hash path` needs to be redone and is also left as-is).
Good to document these formats separately from commands that happen to
use them.
Eventually I would like this and `builtins.derivation` to refer to a
store section on derivations that is authoritative, but that doesn't yet
exist, and will take some time to make. So I think we're just best off
merging this now as is.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
A small step towards https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6507
I believe this incomplete definition is one that can be agreed on.
It would be nice to define more, but considering that the issue
also proposes changes to the design, I believe we should hold off
on those.
As for the wording, we're dealing with some very general and vague
terms, that have to be treated with exactly the right amount of
vagueness to be effective.
I start out with a fairly abstract definition of package.
1. to establish a baseline so we know what we're talking about
2. so that we can go in and clarify that we have an extra, Nix-specific
definition.
"Software" is notoriously ill-defined, so it makes a great qualifier
for package, which we don't really want to pin down either, because
that would just get us lost in discussion.
We can come back to this after we've done 6057 and a few years in a
desert cave.
Then comes the "package attribute set" definition.
I can already hear Valentin say "That's not even Nix's responsibility!"
and on some days I might even agree.
However, in our current reality, we have `nix-env`, `nix-build` and
`nix profile`, which query the `outputName` attribute - among others -
which just don't exist in the derivation.
For those who can't believe what they're reading:
$ nix-build --expr 'with import ./. {}; bind // {outputName = "lib";}' --no-out-link
this path will be fetched (1.16 MiB download, 3.72 MiB unpacked):
/nix/store/rfk6klfx3z972gavxlw6iypnj6j806ma-bind-9.18.21-lib
copying path '/nix/store/rfk6klfx3z972gavxlw6iypnj6j806ma-bind-9.18.21-lib' from 'https://cache.nixos.org'...
/nix/store/rfk6klfx3z972gavxlw6iypnj6j806ma-bind-9.18.21-lib
and let me tell you that bind is not a library.
So anyway, that's also proof of why calling this a "derivation attrset" would be wrong, despite the type attribute.
The Nix team has requested that this output format remain unchanged.
I've added a warning to the man page explaining that `nix-instantiate
--eval` output will not parse correctly in many situations.
channels make everything more stateful, and therefore more complicated
and potentially confusing, but aren't needed for this task, so don't encourage their use.
* deduplicate installation instructions
- reorder sections to present pinned installation more prominently
- remove outdated notes on the macOS installer rework
- update instructions to handle the installer tarball
Co-authored-by: Travis A. Everett <travis.a.everett@gmail.com>
since `up` and `values` are both pointer-aligned the type field will
also be pointer-aligned, wasting 48 bits of space on most machines. we
can get away with removing the type field altogether by encoding some
information into the `with` expr that created the env to begin with,
reducing the GC load for the absolutely massive amount of single-entry
envs we create for lambdas. this reduces memory usage of system eval by
quite a bit (reducing heap size of our system eval from 8.4GB to 8.23GB)
and gives similar savings in eval time.
running `nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'`
before:
Time (mean ± σ): 5.576 s ± 0.003 s [User: 5.197 s, System: 0.378 s]
Range (min … max): 5.572 s … 5.581 s 10 runs
after:
Time (mean ± σ): 5.408 s ± 0.002 s [User: 5.019 s, System: 0.388 s]
Range (min … max): 5.405 s … 5.411 s 10 runs
a bunch of derivation strings contain no escape sequences. we can
optimize for this fact by first scanning for the end of a derivation
string and simply returning the contents unmodified if no escape
sequences were found. to make this even more efficient we can also use
BackedStringViews to avoid copies, avoiding heap allocations for
transient data.
before:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 6.952 s ± 0.015 s [User: 5.294 s, System: 1.452 s]
Range (min … max): 6.926 s … 6.974 s 10 runs
after:
Benchmark 1: nix eval --raw --impure --expr 'with import <nixpkgs/nixos> {}; system'
Time (mean ± σ): 6.907 s ± 0.012 s [User: 5.272 s, System: 1.429 s]
Range (min … max): 6.893 s … 6.926 s 10 runs
This fixes a segfault on infinite function call recursion (rather than
infinite thunk recursion) by tracking the function call depth in
`EvalState`.
Additionally, to avoid printing extremely long stack traces, stack
frames are now deduplicated, with a `(19997 duplicate traces omitted)`
message. This should only really be triggered in infinite recursion
scenarios.
Before:
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr '(x: x x) (x: x x)'
Segmentation fault: 11
After:
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr '(x: x x) (x: x x)'
error: stack overflow
at «string»:1:14:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
$ nix-instantiate --eval --expr '(x: x x) (x: x x)' --show-trace
error:
… from call site
at «string»:1:1:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… while calling anonymous lambda
at «string»:1:2:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… from call site
at «string»:1:5:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… while calling anonymous lambda
at «string»:1:11:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
… from call site
at «string»:1:14:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
(19997 duplicate traces omitted)
error: stack overflow
at «string»:1:14:
1| (x: x x) (x: x x)
| ^
Previously, IFDs would be built within the eval store, even though one
is typically using `--eval-store` precisely to *avoid* local builds.
Because the resulting Nix expression must be copied back to the eval
store in order to be imported, this requires the eval store to trust
the build store's signatures.
It might seem obnoxious to have yet more configure flags, but I found
controlling both the unit and functional tests with one flag was quite
confusing because they are so different:
- unit tests depending on building, functional tests don't (e.g. when
we test already-built Nix)
- unit tests can be installed, functional tests cannot
- unit tests neeed extra libraries (GTest, RapidCheck), functional
tests need extra executables (jq).
- unit tests are run by `make check`, functional tests are run by `make
installcheck`
Really on a technical level, they seem wholly independent. Only on a
human level ("they are both are tests") do they have anything in common.
I had messed up the logic in cross builds because of this. Now I
split the flag in two (and cleaned up a few other inconsistencies), and
the logic fixed itself.
Co-Authored-By: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
* document `fetchTree`
* display experimental feature note at the top
we have to enable the new `fetchTree` experimental feature to render it
at all. this was a bug introduced when adding that new feature flag.
Co-authored-by: tomberek <tomberek@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Silvan Mosberger <github@infinisil.com>
* Print the value in `error: cannot coerce` messages
This extends the `error: cannot coerce a TYPE to a string` message
to print the value that could not be coerced. This helps with debugging
by making it easier to track down where the value is being produced
from, especially in errors with deep or unhelpful stack traces.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
This includes position information in more places, making debugging
easier.
Before:
```
$ nix-instantiate --show-trace --eval tests/functional/lang/eval-fail-using-set-as-attr-name.nix
error:
… while evaluating an attribute name
at «none»:0: (source not available)
error: value is a set while a string was expected
```
After:
```
error:
… while evaluating an attribute name
at /pwd/lang/eval-fail-using-set-as-attr-name.nix:5:10:
4| in
5| attr.${key}
| ^
6|
error: value is a set while a string was expected
```
Today, with the tests inside a `tests` intermingled with the
corresponding library's source code, we have a few problems:
- We have to be careful that wildcards don't end up with tests being
built as part of Nix proper, or test headers being installed as part
of Nix proper.
- Tests in libraries but not executables is not right:
- It means each executable runs the previous unit tests again, because
it needs the libraries.
- It doesn't work right on Windows, which doesn't want you to load a
DLL just for the side global variable . It could be made to work
with the dlopen equivalent, but that's gross!
This reorg solves these problems.
There is a remaining problem which is that sibbling headers (like
`hash.hh` the test header vs `hash.hh` the main `libnixutil` header) end
up shadowing each other. This PR doesn't solve that. That is left as
future work for a future PR.
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
This makes for more useful manual table of contents, that displays the
information at a glance.
The `nix help-stores` command is kept as-is, even though it will show up
in the manual with the same information as these pages due to the way it
is written as a "`--help`-style" command. Deciding what to do with that
command is left for a later PR.
This change also lists all store types at the top of the respective overview page.
Co-authored-by: John Ericson <John.Ericson@Obsidian.Systems
this focuses on `nix-shell -p` and refers to search.nixos.org for
package search, which is currently the easiest and most effective way to
find program names.
- put the highlight box around all the relevant instructions
- simplify the wording
- make the link more prominent by using the whole phrase for the link text
- helps navigating the code as it highlights which files are generated
- makes it less error prone when working incrementally
(although this should be just fixed by building out of tree)
Previously many of the documentation targets were depending on
`$(bindir)/nix` which is the installed version. This meant that its
install rules would be triggered (which in chain would also trigger the
install of libraries, as reported in #5140). Therefore a build of the
documentation without an installation would not be possible (which apart
from doing unwanted operations it may also generate permission problems
for example).
The fix makes the rules depend on `$(nix_PATH)` instead, which is the
executable in the build tree.
`installcheck` doesn't yet work, but the rest of the build can now
happen mostly inside a separate build directory.
Progress on #9342
Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io>
up to now, those were managed outside of this repo, which as
unsurprisingly a real hassle to deal with if one wanted to prevent URLs
from breaking when moving pages around. this change removes a large part
of the friction involved in moving content in the Nix manual.
possible next steps for further automation:
- check for content that moved and warn if it's not reachable from
links that were valid prior to a change
- create redirect rules automatically based on this information
