For several platforms we don't currently have "native" Nix packages
(e.g. Mac OS X and FreeBSD). This provides the next best thing: a
tarball containing the closure of Nix, plus a simple script
"nix-finish-install" that initialises the Nix database, registers the
paths in the closure as valid, and runs "nix-env -i /path/to/nix" to
initialise the user profile.
The tarball must be unpacked in the root directory. It creates
/nix/store/... and /usr/bin/nix-finish-install. Typical installation
is as follows:
$ cd /
$ tar xvf /path/to/nix-1.1pre1234_abcdef-x86_64-linux.tar.bz2
$ nix-finish-install
(if necessary add ~/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh to the shell
login scripts)
After this, /usr/bin/nix-finish-install can be deleted, if desired.
The downside to the binary tarball is that it's pretty big (~55 MiB
for x86_64-linux).
Nix needs SQLite's foreign key constraint feature, which was
introduced in 3.6.19. Without it, the database won't be cleaned up
correctly when paths are deleted. See
e.g. http://hydra.nixos.org/build/2494142.
Mandatory features are features that MUST be present in a derivation's
requiredSystemFeatures attribute. One application is performance
testing, where we have a dedicated machine to run performance tests
(and nothing else). Then we would add the label "perf" to the
machine's mandatory features and to the performance testing
derivations.
There is a race condition when doing parallel builds with chroots and
the immutable bit enabled. One process may call makeImmutable()
before the other has called link(), in which case link() will fail
with EPERM. We could retry or wrap the operation in a lock, but since
this condition is rare and I'm lazy, we just use the existing copy
fallback.
Fixes#9.
This should fix rare Hydra errors of the form:
error: symlinking `/nix/var/nix/gcroots/per-user/hydra/hydra-roots/7sfhs5fdmjxm8sqgcpd0pgcsmz1kq0l0-nixos-iso-0.1pre33785-33795' to `/nix/store/7sfhs5fdmjxm8sqgcpd0pgcsmz1kq0l0-nixos-iso-0.1pre33785-33795': File exists
