For instance, it's pointless to keep copy-from-other-stores running if
there are no other stores, or download-using-manifests if there are no
manifests. This also speeds things up because we don't send queries
to those substituters.
Previously, if a binary cache is hanging/unreachable/slow,
download-from-binary-cache.pl would also hang without any indication
to the user. Now, if fetching a URL takes more than 5 seconds, it
will print a message to that effect.
Amazon S3 returns HTTP status code 403 if a file doesn't exist and the
user has no permission to list the contents of the bucket. So treat
it as 404 (meaning it's cached in the NARExistence table).
The "$UID != 0" makes no sense: if the local side has write access to
the Nix store (which is always the case) then it doesn't matter if
we're root - we can import unsigned paths either way.
Otherwise it will set the parent's stdin to non-blocking mode, causing
the subsequent read of the set of inputs/outputs to fail randomly.
That's insane.
Before selecting a machine, build-remote.pl will try to run the
command "nix-builds-inhibited" on the machine. If this command exists
and returns a 0 exit code, then the machine won't be used. It's up to
the user to provide this command, but it would typically be a script
that checks whether there is enough disk space and whether the load is
not too high.
Don't pass --timeout / --max-silent-time to the remote builder.
Instead, let the local Nix process terminate the build if it exceeds a
timeout. The remote builder will be killed as a side-effect. This
gives better error reporting (since the timeout message from the
remote side wasn't properly propagated) and handles non-Nix problems
like SSH hangs.
This allows providing additional binary caches, useful in scripts like
Hydra's build reproduction scripts, in particular because untrusted
caches are ignored.
This should make live easier for single-user (non-daemon)
installations. Note that when the daemon is used, the "calling user"
is root so we're not using any untrusted caches.
For example, given a derivation with outputs "out", "man" and "bin":
$ nix-build -A pkg
produces ./result pointing to the "out" output;
$ nix-build -A pkg.man
produces ./result-man pointing to the "man" output;
$ nix-build -A pkg.all
produces ./result, ./result-man and ./result-bin;
$ nix-build -A pkg.all -A pkg2
produces ./result, ./result-man, ./result-bin and ./result-2.
Binary caches can now specify a priority in their nix-cache-info file.
The binary cache substituter checks caches in order of priority. This
is to ensure that fast, static caches like nixos.org/binary-cache are
processed before slow, dynamic caches like hydra.nixos.org.
This allows disabling the use of binary caches, e.g.
$ nix-build ... --option use-binary-caches false
Note that
$ nix-build ... --option binary-caches ''
does not disable all binary caches, since the caches defined by
channels will still be used.
If ‘--link’ is given, nix-push will create hard links to the NAR files
in the store, rather than copying them. This is faster and requires
less disk space. However, it doesn't work if the store is on a
different file system.